Turner, Bolton, and Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier (review)

364CIVIL WAR HISTORY licans could resist the patriotic urges to increase the national domain and to defend American rights against British transgressions; but the postwar nationalism of Clay and Calhoun and the bold series of Supreme Court decisions by John Marshall succeeded in restoring Jefferson himself to virtue. The history of these years is normally told from the point of view of those who were doing things. Professor Risjord gives us an interesting review of the Virginia Dynasty from the quite different viewpoint of those normally opposed to doing things. He cautiously gives credit to the Old Republicans for shaping the tradition of American laissez faire, with its love of individual liberty and its suspicion of government. He notes, but perhaps understates, the antimajoritarian, antidemocratic, antinationalist, and, finally, proslavery bent of Old Republicanism. Robert McColley University of Illinois Turner, Bolton, and Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier . By Wilbur R. Jacobs, John W. Caughey, and Joe B. Frantz. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965. Pp. xiii, 113. $2.95.) In the historiography of the American West, the names of Frederick Jackson Turner, Herbert Eugene Bolton, and Walter Prescott Webb stand out conspicuously, like great oaks towering over the rest of the forest. In their classrooms and with their pens, these stimulating scholars set in motion fresh interpretations that would leave a deep imprint on American historical thinking. Turner's thesis of the significance of the frontier in shaping American development undoubtedly made him one of the most influential (and controversial) American historians of all time. Bolton's concept of the Spanish Borderlands and of hemispheric unity once seemed destined to revolutionize the study of the West and of Latin America, although its promise was never fully realized. Webb's focus on the forces of environment as a shaper of man's destiny, first most sharply illustrated in his penetrating study of the Great Plains, then through his broader Great Frontier, at the global level, would mark this Texan as a bold and original historian. This slim volume (less than twenty thousand words) contains brief profiles of Turner, Bolton and Webb, with emphasis more on the men and their methods than on their ideas in depth. Read originally at the Salt Lake City meeting of the Western History Association in 1963 and published the following winter in The American West, each sketch has been slightly enlarged and modified, but has not been changed significantly in the process. These are sympathetic essays, written by competent historians close to their subjects. John Caughey was a student of Bolton's at Berkeley and knew him well; Joe Frantz studied with Webb and was his colleague for a BOOK REVIEWS365 dozen or so years at the University of Texas; Wilbur Jacobs, one of the first to make extensive use of the Turner papers at the Huntington Library, has been at work on a full-length study of the man for some time. Each essay stands by itself, with its own bibliography, a photograph of its subject , and (for whatever it is worth), a facsimile of a manuscript page from his writing. To date, Turner has no doubt had the most profound impact of the three, and Jacobs' profile is probably the most penetrating, relying as it does not only upon Turner's published works, but his unpublished notes and correspondence as well. Caughey and Frantz depend but little on letters and more upon published materials and their own personal associations with their subjects, an approach which tends to make their sketches more anecdotal, with more of the man and less of his thought coming through to the reader. All three—Turner, Bolton and Webb—made their reputations by combining teaching and writing and were idolized by their graduate students. Turner is described as "a committed teacher who hated to write." Webb looked upon historical writing as a literary art and wrote less for his professional colleagues than for the intelligent layman. Like Turner, he was not prolific, but painted on a broad canvas, digesting huge masses of materials and turning ideas over in his mind for years before setting them on paper. Bolton, on the other hand, was not only a "productive giant" in...