African American History and The Frontier Thesis
African American History and The Frontier Thesis
REFERENCES
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230 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
also
also asking
askingmyriad
myriadquestions
questions
about
about
women
women
in the in
West.
the Abigail's
West. Abigail's
mutiny
mutinymay mayhave
have
hadhad
to wait
to wait
two two
hundred
hundred
years, years,
but scholars
but scholars
who who
decided that western women deserved their share of attention have
launched a splendid insurrection. And if Turner the historian would
have been puzzled, Turner the human being surely would have ap-
proved.
Margaret Washington
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A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 231
2 August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profes-
sion, 1915-1980 (Urbana 1986) 3, 46, 90, 117, 129; Richard Hofstadter, The Progres-
sive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parkington (New York 1970), 61-63, 167-170; Ray Allen
Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner. Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York 1973), 436-
437.
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232 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
embody virtues that defined its participants as heroes. As Slotkin il-
lustrates, the "frontier psychology" began when Anglo-Americans
met Indians, and was perpetuated through violent confrontation justi-
fied through sacred, social, and psychological rationalizations, as well
as economic and political expediency. Myth became not only per-
ceived reality but scholarly, historical truth. Myth also became intri-
cately tied to ideology.4 Although Slotkin is concerned with much
more than the place of race in the "national character," he under-
stands how racial character was imbedded in the mythologization of
American history, and its extension to the "frontier psychology."
Even before Turner, white Americans firmly believed in the cul-
ture of distinctiveness, which was, in turn, fueled by "frontier psy-
chology." Turner was more than a product of his time. He was the
griot for a tradition that in important ways continues within the fabric
of American cultural and historical perceptions. Frontier psychology
sustained Manifest Destiny, capitalism, and Social Darwinism; it sup-
ported violence against the "other," expansionism outside American
borders, and racial exclusivity. This is demonstrated historically each
time the nation goes to war. Moreover, "frontier psychology" has
helped to define American historiography, sometimes pseudo-history,
and also its political culture, which is why for historians like Turner
certain participants in the American frontier experience remained in-
visible.
Moving beyond Frederick Jackson Turner involves observing the
frontier more as a metaphor, and less as an actual evocation of "na-
tional character." Billington once noted that Turner offered no tangi-
ble or convincing evidence to support his thesis. The true significance
of Turner's sweeping generalizations, exaggerations, and romantici-
zations, wrote Billington, was their challenging assertions.5 There is
much to challenge.
What impact did Frederick Jackson Turner's highly regarded
1893 address on democracy, the West, and the significance of the
frontier have on the black experience? From Turner's perspective the
answer is none. He makes no mention of blacks, and their role in
frontier development probably never crossed his mind. But despite
Turner's omissions, and regardless of the raw racism of the West, the
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A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 233
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234 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
James Williams, another transplanted black southerner, escaped
Maryland slavery in 1838 at age thirteen. Williams worked with the
underground railroad in Pennsylvania, kept a fruit stand, and fought
slave catchers in Boston before sailing for San Francisco in 1853. Set-
tling in Sacramento, the resourceful Walker engaged in various busi-
ness enterprises, continued his abolitionist activities through the
famous Sacramento court case of fugitive Archy Lee, and traveled
from coast to coast several times. Williams's West was filled with run-
aways, their heroic allies, and slaveholders forever on their heels.
Williams also commented on exclusionary measures passed against
the Chinese, the poor treatment of local Indians, the establishment of
black institutions, and African American participation in the gold
fields. Unlike Beckwourth, Williams wrote and published his own
narrative. Though a little known work, there seems to be little ques-
tion about its authenticity. Williams offers vivid descriptions and in-
sights into life in the West for African Americans.8
Black women such as Hanna Anderson Ropes, a Massachusetts
woman who settled in Kansas in 1855, left accounts of their western
experiences. Ropes, like most frontierwomen black or white, focused
on home and family. For black frontierwomen, isolation and aliena-
tion from a community and from social functions exacerbated by ra-
cial barriers. Not all were primarily homemakers. Slave-born Biddy
Mason walked from Mississippi to Missouri and then to San Bernar-
dino with her three children. A nurse and midwife, "Grandmother
Mason" was noted for works of charity and racial uplift. The first
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles was organized in
her home. Mason became wealthy in California through real estate
ventures and dictated a work of her life and times. Similarly, other
black women kept diaries which today remain largely unexamined in
various western state historical societies.9 These and other primary
Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (1856; rep., New York 1931);
W. Sherman Savage, Blacks in the West (Westport, Conn. 1976), 71-74; Meier and
Rudwick, Black History, 3. For a discussion of attitudes toward mixed racial ancestry
see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-
American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York 1971).
8 James Williams, Life and Adventures of James Williams, A Fugitive Slave, with a
Full Description of the Underground Railroad (San Francisco 1873).
9 Glenda Riley, "American Daughters: Black Women in the West," Montana.
The Magazine of Western History, 38 (Spring 1988), 14-27; Lawrence B. de Graaf,
"Race, Sex, and Region: Black Women in the American West, 1850-1920," Pacific
Historical Review, 49 (May 1980), 285-313, Savage, Blacks in the West, 14, 135.
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A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 235
'o Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919).
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236 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
significant information on African American women in the West.11
Prior to the Civil Rights era, few historians outside the small orbit
of African American scholars noted that the frontier experience was a
factor in African American life and history. And it is unfortunate that
scholars of the West like Porter and Savage remained in relative ob-
scurity until white historians revived and gave credibility to the sub-
ject. These earlier scholars were pioneers in the truest sense, laboring
in selfless isolation and experiencing ostracism from the established
profession. The latecomers, while expanding on earlier studies, also
relied heavily on previous groundbreaking scholarship. General rec-
ognition of the black frontier experience as an integral part of the
American past was a product of the 1960s and 1970s. Books such as
The Negro Cowboys by Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, The Buf-
falo Soldiers by William H. Leckie, and The Black West by William
Loren Katz, presented full treatments of the frontier from a black
perspective. Despite the somewhat superficial and popular orientation
of these works, they began a new historiography and synthetic treat-
ment among scholars who had previously ignored the black West.
Rudolph Lapp's study on blacks in gold rush California and Monroe
Billington's work on New Mexico's buffalo soldiers offer specialized
treatments of black participation in specific areas of western develop-
ment and enhance our knowledge of the collective experience of
blacks in the frontier.12
Perhaps even more significant are works such as Juliet E. K.
Walker's Free Frank that offer an individual, in-depth, and diverse
presentation of the frontier experience of African Americans. Land
speculators, entrepreneurs, ranchers, and other settlers were central
to Turner's West, that he maintained spread "democracy," "republi-
can government," and "community." Walker's Free Frank chronicles
just such an experience. Free Frank (1777-1854) was active in three
successive westward movements between the American Revolution
and the Civil War. This slave-born African American was a product
of the South Carolina piedmont frontier. He moved to the Kentucky
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A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 237
Pennyroyal frontier, purchased his wife's and his own freedom, and
speculated in frontier land. In 1830 Free Frank joined the westward
movement and settled in Pike County, Illinois, establishing in 1836
the town of New Philadelphia. He remained there and continued at-
tempting to purchase relatives until his death in 1854.13
The founding of New Philadelphia by this free black pioneer was
a response to the internal improvement boom created by construction
of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and apparently not motivated by
racial separatism. But Walker believes that Free Frank's entrepreneu-
rial activities also captured the mood of antebellum African Ameri-
cans who reacted to the American Colonization Society's movement,
the socioeconomic plight of urban blacks, and to virulent racism.
Blacks such as Martin Delaney and Reverend Lewis Woodson pro-
posed that instead of Africa, African Americans take advantage of
land opportunities in the West through either individual farmsteads
or colonies of farmers.14
Free Frank was not the only black to establish an antebellum
town. But according to Walker, although undoubtedly sensitive to
race issues, the black proprietor's town was integrated and became
part of Pike County's plans for developing a community. By 1850
New Philadelphia had become an established agricultural center with
a "wheelwright, cabinet-making, and two shoemaking shops, the
blacksmith shop, a general store, a stagecoach stand, and a post of-
fice." It was, in short, a typical and flourishing frontier market
town. 15
13 Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington, Ky.
1983), 1-6, 49-99, 154-160.
14 Ibid., 112-118, 154-155; Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle
for Freedom in America (New York 1981), 130-131.
15 Walker, Free Frank, 145-146.
16 Ibid.
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238 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
17 Kenneth Hamilton, Black Towns and Profit. Promotion and Development in the
Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1915 (Urbana 1991) 1-4, 152. For a different perspec-
tive, see Norman L. Crockett, The Black Towns (Lawrence, Kans. 1979).
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A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 239
18 Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the
Stono Rebellion (New York 1974), 95-130, 195-297.
19 Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy. The Lower Mis-
sissippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill 1992), 81, 107-108, 278-280, 282-284.
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240 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
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