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As important as the racial family has been, it would be myopic to view race as the sole constitutive marker for American family. Another type of family has also been central to American identity. It’s the frontier family. To be sure, there was no single model for families that pushed westward across the continent to settle the frontier. Still, American lore has produced a potent image of hearty families, independent and self-reliant. Indeed, in many ways they were. But in important respects they weren’t completely independent, for they were agents of the nation. They could serve as agents because they were well positioned to play distinctly constitutional roles. Substantively, they contributed in fundamental ways to the political, economic , and moral constitution of the expanding nation. National policy profited from these substantive contributions. On the political and economic fronts, however , there was a complication: nineteenth-century American culture housed at least two distinct conceptions of political economy—one agrarian republican (espoused by Thomas Jefferson), the other liberal capitalist (whose articulate early proponent was Alexander Hamilton). Each posited its own values and its own place for family. The United States’ policy of territorial expansion embodied the tensions between these two conceptions, as Congress pursued both simultaneously . Although this ecumenical embrace partially reconciled the two conceptions , it didn’t suppress conflict entirely. For one thing, there was a persistent political cleavage between homesteaders and speculators. This division, which grew out of competing material interests that were tied to conflicting notions of political economy, pitted an image of the familial farm against that of an individualist market of free laborers. The cleavage was visible not only in Congress, but also on western turf. For another, national policy toward settlement was inextricably bound to the growing sectional conflict over the status and fate of slavery in 5 home on the range families in american Continental Settlement hoMe on the range 109 the order. On the frontier, as we’ve already seen, sectional conflict pitted two versions of the agrarian family against each other. One was the slaveholding household , which viewed its landed entitlement as prior to the nation. The other was a white, non-slaveholding household that traced its landed entitlement directly to the national government. Even on the eve of the Civil War, members of Congress and the president were engaged in political pugilism on both the class-based front and the sectional front. Despite the adoption of the Republican Party’s HomesteadAct afterAbraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, which would seem to have been a victory for white homesteaders against both speculators and slavery (or, if not slavery, against black settlement), western agrarians criticized national policy as wed to capitalism. Amid all the commotion, however, Congress was clear and consistent about one thing: family’s function was to maintain (and extend) political dominion into the territories and across the continent. Would family comply with Congress’s expectations? Western families did indeed help maintain and extend the authority of the nation across the continent. They were both essential and useful to this task. They were essential for two reasons. first, agriculture was the primary mode of production on the frontier; second, the means for pursuing agriculture tended to make family, not the individual, the basic unit capable of material self-sufficiency. Families were useful to the task, because connections among families created communities, which were the basis for a rudimentary form of politics, which in turn was the foundation for political control of the territories and their admission into the union. If families helped maintain the order, however, they also changed it. There were several reasons for this. Environmental exigencies, the weakness of law, and the paucity of established social ties permitted—in some respects required— changes in family.Among the changes were subtle alterations in relations between wives and husbands. It would be a mistake to make too much of the significance (or longevity) of some of these alterations, but it’s fair to say that they had two consequences that were relevant to constitutional order. First, families in the western territories helped produce a political movement whose expressed aim was to challenge the Hamiltonian conception of political economy. Second, alterations of roles within western families helped revise people’s conception of who could be a political member of the constitutional order. In short, western women exploited their moral role, expanded their economic role, and were much less excluded from a political role than were their sisters back East. As...

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