Americans have customarily defined the frontier as the limit of European-American agricultural settlement. This definition ignores the fact that many Native Americans farmed and lived in towns. More recently, historians have viewed frontiers less as a boundary and more as a zone of communication between cultures--between European Americans and Native Americans as well as between Anglo-Americans and colonists from other European powers. In particular, scholars have emphasized the role of the individuals who lived along and traveled through the frontier as cultural intermediaries. Whatever definition one uses, the period between 1754 and 1815 witnessed the frontier's pushing back from east of the Appalachians to just beyond the Mississippi River.

Traditional ideas of the frontier were in large part molded by the Enlightenment thought of the revolutionary generation, whose republican beliefs held that all societies could be placed on a spectrum from primitive to advanced. A primitive society was one that depended on hunting and gathering; many European Americans falsely assumed that Native Americans were at this level of development. Conservatives also believed that even the European Americans who moved to the frontier adopted the Indian mode of living and became hunters and gatherers as well. As a society moved toward civilization, it became more dependent on agriculture, and with the addition of new layers of complexity, commerce became more important, cities and urban life developed, and industrial production expanded. The revolutionary generation, however, believed that there were cycles in history: The more advanced stages of civilization were symptoms of decay, leading to the society's destruction and the beginning of the cycle all over again. From this perspective, the frontier's expansion was crucial since new areas of settlement promised to sustain the United States as an agricultural nation and put off the end of European-American society.

Concerns with the frontier played a role in the origins of the American Revolution. After victory in the French and Indian War (1754-63), colonial Americans hoped that new lands west of the Appalachians would be open to settlement. However, in an effort to protect its Native American subjects, and to reduce military expenditures, the British government issued the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting settlement west of the Appalachians. The Quebec Act of 1774 granted this territory to Canada and also sought to limit colonial American settlement in the West, a barrier to frontier expansion that became an important colonial grievance. At the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-83), the Treaty of Paris (1783) provided a generous boundary for the United States, stretching to the Mississippi River. During the 1770s, Daniel Boone and a few other European Americans had already begun to cross the mountains. Following the war, thousands of European Americans streamed across the Appalachians to settle the new frontier. U.S. government efforts to guide and limit the settlements to below the Ohio River proved fruitless, leading to a series of wars with Native Americans that culminated in the Battle of Tippecanoe (November 7, 1811) and Andrew Jackson's campaign against the Creek Indians in the War of 1812 (1812-15).

Popular images of the frontier reflect only some of the reality. Men did wear coonskin caps, and the first dwellings erected were often lean-tos or crude log cabins. But as soon as people on the frontier could afford to, they bought clothing in stores and improved their houses. Perhaps equally important in the mythology was the idea that every frontiersman wanted his own piece of land to farm and to raise a family in some agrarian paradise. Few on the frontier had such limited ambitions. Settlers south of the Ohio often hoped someday to own a plantation with slaves; settlers farther north may have simply wanted to produce a cash crop for the market. Speculation was rampant on the frontier. Those with the grandest dreams sought to acquire thousands of acres. More humble men merely wanted to improve the land to sell it for a higher price. Within such an aggressively capitalistic atmosphere, more fortunes were lost than won. The frontier, in other words, was less rough and tumble and more boom and bust.

Bibliography:

1) Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)

2) Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)

3) Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)

4) James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999)

5) Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1995)

Free term papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to buy a custom written research paper, term paper, or essay on American Revolution at affordable price. CustomTermPapers is the best solution for those who seek help in writing term papers, essays, and research papers related to American Revolution and other relevant topics.