Saturday, July 20, 2019

Offsite Post: ‘The Frontier Is Essential for the American Project’


Key to the survival of the modern American project is never-ending motion, an eternal advance toward new horizons, new discoveries, greater progress.  If folks in the States ever had to settle down and be content with where they were and what they had, many of them would, to quote The X-Files’s Dana Scully, ‘lapse into catatonic schizophrenia’ (‘Home’, http://www.insidethex.co.uk/transcrp/scrp403.htm).

Thus, some new frontier, some new challenge, must always be laid before them to overcome.  Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., U of Wisconsin Press, 1978) traces the development of this mindset.  In the early nineteenth century we find sentiments like this:

 . . . Politicians justified annexation and the Westward movement as part of America’s duty to “manifest to mankind the excellence of the divine principles of our Revolution”: “For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen” (p. 142).

 . . . Under Jefferson’s administration, and then Jackson’s, the expansion across Indian land proved beyond any doubt what all those terms implied – that America was not a territorial definition (except in the vague sense of “New World”), but the symbol of an ideological consensus.  “From the analogy of reason and providence,” as well as “from prophecy,” said Thomas Blockway in 1784, in a sermon commemorating the Revolution, “it is apparent that [the] . . . three thousand miles of Western territory” constitute the “stage on which [God means] to exhibit the great things of His Kingdom.”  Forty-two years later, Daniel Webster declared that the “principle” of the Revolution “adheres to the American soil.  It is bedded in it, immovable as the mountains.”  By 1856, Charles Dana could confidently announce that “the region which, commencing on the slope of the Alleghanies, broadens over the vast prairie” is “the Land of Promise, and the Canaan of our time”; if only the proper “New England minds” would direct the Westward migration – and if only they would keep “the enemies of our Revolution” from “making us a by-word and a scoff for mankind” – then the “wildest dreamer on the future of our race may one day see actualized a destiny far outreaching in splendor his most generous visions” (p. 161).

 . . . In “this chosen land,” ran the argument, God “has been for ages watching and preparing.  . . . The elements of a glorious order of civilization are now ready”; “we have increased beyond all previous calculations: we are surrounded by all comforts”; man’s “highest destiny” lies before us – “the untransacted destiny of the American people . . . to subdue the continent – to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point” – and this divine “right of manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation.”  Implicit in all these statements . . . is the vision first expressed in God’s Promise to his Plantations:  “Others take the land by His providence, but God’s people take the land by promise” (p. 162).

 . . . “By promise,” they believed, the land belonged to them before they belonged to the land, and they took possession, accordingly, first by imposing their own image upon it, and then by seeing themselves reflected back in the image they had imposed.  The wilderness/garden became their mirror of prophecy.  They saw themselves revealed in it as the New Israel that would make the desert blossom as the rose.  They also discerned in it those who did not belong to the land:  Indians, heretics, opponents of the New England way, adherents to the ways of the Old World.  . . . Romanticism added the dimension of the sublime to wilderness and garden.  . . . American romantics looked to nature, as the New England Puritan had to Scripture, as a confirmation of the destiny of the New World.  What they saw there was the vast frontier, mirroring, come iri da iri, by the light of prophecy, “the universal Yankee nation.”

Their concept of the frontier is a measure of their debt to the Puritans.  Traditionally, frontier meant a border dividing one people from another.  In a sense, the Puritans recognized those differences – their “frontier” separated them from the Indian “outer darkness” – but they could hardly accept the restriction as permanent.  America was God’s Country, after all, and they were on a redemptive errand for mankind.  In effect, their motive for colonization entailed a decisive shift in the meaning of frontier, from a secular barrier to a mythical threshold.  Even as they spoke of their frontier as a meeting-ground between two civilizations, Christian and pagan, they redefined it, in a rhetorical inversion characteristic of the myth-making imagination, to mean a figural outpost, the outskirts of the advancing kingdom of God.  It became, in short, not a dividing line but a summons to territorial expansion.  And when after the Revolution the holy commonwealth spread westward across the continent, bringing light into darkness – or in one of Cotton Mather’s favorite phrases, “irradiating an Indian wilderness” – the frontier movement came to provide a sort of serial enactment of the ritual of the jeremiad.  It was the moving stage for the quintessentially American drams of destined progress, of process as order and control.  By the time of Jackson, the Puritan-Revolutionary inversion was standardized.  What in Europe signified history and restriction, came in America to signify prophecy and unlimited prospects.  This reading of frontier altered the Puritan concept, to be sure, from threat to promise; but in doing so it amplified (rather than changed) the old sense of errand.  In part at least, Jacksonians also regarded the frontier as a savage domain awaiting liberation, and they also invoked it, as we have seen, as a vehicle of the jeremiad: to create anxiety, to denounce backsliders, to reinforce social values, and (summarily) to define the American consensus.

This vision of the frontier had its chronometrical side in the American sublime.  The Puritans had sought correlations between their environment and Scripture; the Jacksonian romantics, expanding the outlook of the Revolutionary era, read the biblical promises in nature itself.  The Alleghenies, the prairies, the Hudson and Mississippi rivers became their Book of Revelation.  “Never before,” David Huntington has observed, “had the landscape painter known such urgency.  He had, for the first time in the world, been asked to paint the myth of human destiny,” to find an “iconology” through which the “spectator could slough off the Old World psyche and be spiritually reborn into the New World.”  And that new birth, be it noted, was not “Adamic” or “prelapsarian,” as our literary critics have told us, but (like the “National birth-day”) progressive and redemptive.  Its purpose was precisely to turn the nostalgia for paradise lost into a movement toward the future.  It was shaped not by Rousseau but by New England Puritanism (pgs. 162-5).

It is important to note before going on that this sort of thinking about the frontier is mainly a product of the New England soul, which embraces change and progress as virtues.  The Southerner by contrast has always been defined by adherence to sameness and tradition.  The latter ought to be as eager as any to throw off the Yankee ideology as something foreign to his way of life.

Withal, many from the Southern and Western States have gotten themselves bound up in the fast-paced Yankee lifestyle and have even entered the circles of the Elite alongside their Yankee cousins.  And it is here that we pick up the history of the idea of the frontier.  By the latter half of the 20th century, the old New England Elite, having enriched themselves over the last hundred years or so by exploiting the peoples and lands beyond the frontier (i.e., the South and West), were ready to close the frontier, to cut off the ability for social advancement of the lower classes to the Elite circles.  But the New-Rich Elite from the South and West wanted to keep the frontier open and social mobility possible.  This conflict between Old and New Elite over the frontier, and its consequences for Americanism, is well-described by Carl Oglesby in his book The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York City, Berkley Publishing, 1976, https://ia800204.us.archive.org/8/items/OglesbyCarlTheYankeeAndCowboyWar/Oglesby,%20Carl%20-%20The%20Yankee%20and%20Cowboy%20War.pdf, via https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/george-herbert-walker-bush-3/).  Mr Oglesby says,

 . . .


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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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