The New and (Somewhat) Improved Frontier Thesis

For more than a century, Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis have loomed over the study of the American West, much like the sword-wielding giant that hovers over England on the cover of Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan, the work that inspires both the title and thesis of Patrick Griffin's new book. In recent decades, historians have sought to expunge Turner's dominant presence from the interpretive landscape. They have condemned the frontier thesis for its Euro-centric and racist assumptions, carving up Turner for his depiction of enlightened whites and savage natives and for discounting Indian agency. Historians studying the American Revolution have assailed Turner's argument that the frontier created America character and ideology by revealing how Americans drew upon European antecedents and their own experiences in urban or rural settings that did not involve fights with Indians or land speculators. New studies of backcountry political and economic life revealed that the frontier was neither especially democratic nor equal.

Now, in the wake of this onslaught, comes Patrick Griffin, who, in American Leviathan, attempts to resurrect the frontier thesis, albeit in a new version ostensibly stripped of its racism, Euro-centrism, and mythic notions of white democracy and egalitarianism. Like Turner, Griffin sees the frontier experience at the root of both American character and the emergence of democratic ideals during the Revolutionary period. Unlike Turner, who was oblivious to white racism or attempted to justify it, Griffin makes white supremacy and Indian hating key components of this new democratic American character. Indeed, Griffin goes so far as to argue that experiences on the Revolutionary frontier actually created American racism from the bottom-up. Thus, what Griffin offers is a less comforting version of the Turner thesis that includes a more pessimistic assessment of Revolutionary-era democracy, primarily by highlighting its underlying racism.

Griffin also puts a new spin on frontier determinism by adding a dark Hobbesian twist. As Griffin sees it, the frontier's transformative power came from its endemic violence, mostly in the form of Indian-white conflict. Griffin portrays the Revolutionary frontier as being in a constant "state of nature" of the sort that Hobbes described in The Leviathan, where people without government lived in a perpetual warlike "world of all against all, in which civil society ceased to exist" (p. 4). Chaos, he asserts, became the crucible for how white frontiersmen defined their revolutionary ideals in both their progressive and racist guises. White settlers wanted a new government that would free them from the frontier's state of nature by protecting them from Indian attacks, wresting farmland from Indian peoples, and advancing plebian land claims over those of wealthy speculators.

To make the case for his frontier thesis, Griffin charts violence in the Ohio Valley from the end of the French and Indian War to the U.S. victory at Fallen Timbers. Most of the action happens in central to western Pennsylvania and Virginia and in the region that would become Kentucky (Griffin gives the Ohio Valley a decidedly eastern tilt). The book opens with the creation of the Proclamation Line of 1763 that satisfied no one on the frontier—not Indians or white settlers or speculators or colonial leaders or the British officials tasked with administering the frontier. The basic problem was that Britain could not police the line (or, more accurately, would not dedicate the resources needed to police the line). As a result, Indians complained of encroachment by settlers and speculators. Settlers seethed about a lack of protection from Indians. And speculators pivoted between various complaints depending on what they thought would best secure them rights to the land in preference to Indians, squatters, and British rivals. With Britain unable or unwilling to control the situation, violence escalated. And as the situation deteriorated so too did faith in the competence and benevolence of the British empire. This pattern of violence and the struggle over the land between Indians, white settlers, and speculating elites escalated...