Frontier Violence and the American Mind

Frontier Violence and the American Mind GRAHAM ADAMS, JR. Richard Slotkin. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Middletown , Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. 670pp. Michael Paul Rogin. FathersandChildren:Andrew Jackson and The Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. 373 pp. W. Eugene Hollon. FrontierViolence:Another Look. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. 279 pp. During the relatively placid decade of the 1950's historians tended to stress the underlying unity and cohesiveness of American history. Then a period of racial strife, campus turmoil, political assassination, and Viet Nam sparked research into new themes. Those which received attention included violence in America, the white man's treatment of the Indian, and a new look at the importance of the frontier. All three books under review share these concerns. Slotkin and Ragin follow similar intellectual paths while Hollon sets a divergent course. In Slotkin' s view, seconded by Rogin, the frontier and the Indian rank as the two most dominant influences on the American mind. Early settlers, he observes , envisioned the frontier as an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation. With the passage of time, however, "the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence , and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience." From the outset Puritan and Indian were irreconcilable. Indian culture worshipped, accepted, and remained at one with Nature. Nature, in the Puritan view, evoked savagery and licentiousness. The Puritans wanted a sanctified society, Slotkin declares, based on moral principles which held wild men and wild passions in check. They feared that the wilderness might seduce men away from God. Frontier life for the Puritan meant a constant struggle between Christianity and Paganism, civilization and savagery, Good and Evil. Red men and white could never find a common ground for accommodation . After the French-Indian War, Slotnick continues, the harsh Puritan analysis gave way to a softer view which looked upon Nature as a source of wisdom and renewal. French philosophes praised the Indian as the Noble Savage; in America, Daniel Boone became a major culture hero. Several narratives emphasized that each time Boone emerged from the wilderness he returned wiser and possessed of new insights. Boone represented simplicity, honesty, balance; the hunter constantly regenerated by his proximity to Nature. Despite their more positive outlook on Nature, Slotkin notes, most whites still considered the Indian a doomed race. Eastern Puritans sought his total conversion or his extinction; Westerners and Southerners wanted to expand and the Indian stood in their path. In addition, while they believed that contact with THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 1, SPRING 1976 Nature regenerated men, white Americans also feared becoming like the Indian. Throughout all of American history the red man always ranked as the arch typical villain. Slotkin speculates that even the emnity encountered by millitant urban blacks and hippies stemmed in large measure from the fact that their critics saw them simply as another version of hostile Indians. Paul Ragin, who believes with Slotkin that the frontier is the major factor which shaped the American character, bases his analysis on Freudian psychoanalytic concepts. Liberalism, Rogin contends, had wrenched men from their traditional cultural institutions (church, aristocracy, local customs) while the new market society had destroyed their basic economic bulwark (the self-sufficient family). Freudian theory suggests that when an infant is removed from its mother it flies into a rage because of the separation and fear of her loss. Rogin applies this idea to society as a whole claiming that when men lost their old "mother" culture the frontier afforded them opportunity to project their suppressed infantile rage on to Indians. Liberalism had triumphed over the past only to create a hidden yearning to return to it. If Liberalism represented work, repression of instincts, and private property, then to the white man, the Indian represented laziness, uncontrolled passion, and communal property. Forbidden their own blissful" oral" past, Rogin argues, white Americans took their revenge on the red man. Andrew Jackson, according to Rogin, emerged as a national hero and symbol precisely because...