African American History and The Frontier Thesis

Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
African American History and the Frontier Thesis

Author(s): Margaret Washington
Source: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 230-241
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of
the Early American Republic
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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.
African American History and the Frontier Thesis
Margaret Washington
"Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portions of

the past, from points of view furnished by new conditions which
reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately
known by the historians of the previous generation. "'
Frederick Jackson Turner and other historians of the Progressive Era,

such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., and Charles Beard, found no
place for race or gender in their perspectives on American history. To
these historians, even slavery and Reconstruction were important pri-
marily because of their impact on white America and white institu-
tions. Schlesinger ignored black history in his writings but served on
the Council of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and His-
tory and encouraged his black students, Rayford Logan and John
Hope Franklin, who chose black history topics. In his scholarship,
Charles Beard dismissed egalitarian and humanistic principles in re-
gard to the Fourteenth Amendment, interpreting it merely as a con-
spiratorial move to promote and protect corporations; yet according to
Richard Hofstadter, Beard boasted of a liberal Quaker heritage, a
grandfather who harbored fugitive slaves, and a father who challenged
racial prejudice. On the other hand, Turner came from unrecon-
structed Jacksonian stock (his father was named Andrew Jackson
Margaret Washington, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University, is

the author of A Peculiar People. Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs
(1988) and numerous articles on African Americans.
' Frederick Jackson Turner, "Social Forces in American History," American
Historical Review, 16 (Jan. 1911), 225.
A SYMPOSIUM ON FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 231
Turner). Turner's biographer, Ray Allen Billington, noted that

Turner borrowed the prejudice and bigotry as well as the idealism of
the West. He viewed immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century as "a menace to traditional values and institutions,"
shared contemporary prejudices against Jews, and on at least two occa-
sions stated that the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee of black fran-
chise was unwise.2 The Progressive Era was, in the words of
contemporary journalist and activist Ray Stannard Baker, "for whites
only." Nevertheless, progressive historians introduced a school of
thought based upon economic and political conflict, and Turner's insis-
tence that American distinctiveness derived from a pattern of sociologi-
cal processes related to westward expansion was central to this
paradigm.
In his 1893 address, "The Significance of the Frontier," Turner
viewed American expansionism as a movement of social develop-
ment, from colonial times to 1890, with white Americans successively
advancing into "free land," establishing "superior" institutions, and
spreading "civilization," via democracy, economic power, and indi-
vidual freedom. According to Turner, as the nation moved west, each
region-the Atlantic frontier, the Indian trader's frontier, the ranch-
er's frontier, the farmer's frontier, and frontier army posts-intro-
duced its unique characteristics and contributed largely to the making
of the "American character." Strong, motivated, self-reliant settlers
took advantage of the frontier's unlimited opportunities and thrust
themselves to the top of society. "Rugged individualism" and "free
land," which provided a "safety valve," were nurturing and regener-
ative forces that successive waves of white settlers experienced.3
Neither Turner's message nor his historical vision of American
expansion were original. Scholars like Richard Slotkin have pointed
out that Turner articulated a long-accepted myth. Insofar as myth-
making aims to create and control a national reality, to operate as a
source of power, the frontier myth succeeded for many years.
Through acting out and retelling over generations, the myth came to
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.
3 Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American

History," in Everett E. Edwards, ed., The Early Writings of FrederickJackson Turner,
With a List of All His Works (Madison, Wisc. 1938), 185-229.
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
4 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. The Mythology of the American

Frontier 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn. 1973), 3-24, passim; Slotkin, The Fatal Envi-
ronment. The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York
1985), 3-80.
5 Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner, 129-131.
frontier held experiential possibilities for African Americans that are

revealed in their writings. Moreover, current historiographical trends
illustrate that for African Americans the frontier concept had a
broader meaning than the Turner thesis implied, broader even than
that perceived by later historians who wrote specifically on the black
West.
In 1902, Richard R. Wright, Jr., noted that the black presence

and participation in the western experience began even before that of
Anglo-Americans. Wright wrote a carefully documented article for
the American Anthropologist on blacks who lived and labored in South
America and New Spain one hundred years before Jamestown. His
"Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers" was ignored until
1969, when it finally was reprinted.6 Furthermore, some blacks par-
ticipating in the United States' westward migration documented first
hand their experiences in frontier society. For example, James P.
Beckwourth (1798-1866), Missouri-born explorer, trader, scout, and
trapper, dictated an autobiography of his adventures and exploits.
First published in 1856, his account was reissued in 1931 with a rac-
ist, bombastic introduction by cultural historian Bernard De Voto,
who reduced Beckwourth's account to mere legend. Yet eyewitnesses
to Beckwourth's ventures insisted that he was "the most famous In-
dian fighter of his generation." Beckwourth also found the first suc-
cessful pass (which still bears his name) through the Sierra Nevadas to
the Sacramento Valley gold fields. Self-trained frontier historian
Francis Parkman thought Beckwourth "a fellow of bad character-a
compound of white and black blood," and considered his narrative
"false." Undoubtedly Parkman could not countenance an African
American performing the deeds attributed to Beckwourth, whose
courage and audacity astonished even Native Americans. Had he
been white, Beckwourth would appear in textbooks as a western ar-
chetypical hero-one who helped define the "national character."
Most western heroes from Daniel Boone to Kit Carson and Wyatt
Earp imbibe legend and quasi-mythology yet still become part of our
history. But Beckwourth was worse than "other." He was of mixed
racial ancestry, and this relegated him to a "hybrid" status, which
prompted Parkman to label Beckwourth a "bad" character.7
6 Richard R. Wright, "Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers," in Au-

gust Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., The Making of Black America (2 vols., New York
1969), I, 25-33.
7 T. D. Bonner, ed., The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer,
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.
sources still afford historians an opportunity write the African Ameri-

cans' role into histories of the West.
It is important to remember, on this one-hundredth anniversary
of his frontier thesis, that Frederick Jackson Turner's vision of
the West has been democratized, at least partly pluralized, and
greatly stripped of its mythology. Turner and his followers need not
have looked far to uncover black participation in the frontier experi-
ence. Even during his own lifetime, Turner's exclusion of blacks qui-
etly was being revised by African American historians.
In 1919, Delilah Beasley, a black amateur California historian
wrote Negro Trailblazers of California. Although she lacked formal train-
ing, Beasley's approach was professional. She searched California re-
cords at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, examined the state archives
in Sacramento, explored newspapers, land, hospital, and poor-farm
records. She investigated assembly and senate journals, legal reports
and state statutes. Although some of Beasley's historical judgments
were problematic, her self-published book was sound enough for later
scholars to rely upon.10
While progressive and consensus historians in white institutions
ignored the black frontier experience, scholars publishing in theJour-
nal of Negro History, Negro History Bulletin, and with Carter G. Wood-
son's Associated Publishers wrote prolifically about African American
presence in the West. Beasley's 1918 article, "Slavery in California"
documented important but little-known information about slavery in
the American West. Additionally, Beasley was perhaps the first per-
son to write on black women in the West. Kenneth Wiggins Porter's
pioneering articles on black participation in fur trading, the Seminole
Wars, black-Indian relations, and the trans-Mississippi black experi-
ence also were published in the Journal of Negro History over a period of
several decades. In 1971 a collection of Porter's most important arti-
cles was published in one volume. His contribution to the scholarship
about blacks in the West remains unmatched. Porter was not only
informative but analytical and critical in his approach to the frontier
experience. W. Sherman Savage, whose remarkable academic career
spanned nearly fifty years, also researched extensively on the black
frontier experience. Like Porter, most of Savage's work was pub-
lished in the Journal of Negro History and he too lived to see his scholar-
ship recognized by the historical profession. In 1976 Savage published
Blacks in the West, a culmination of decades of research that included
'o Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919).
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
11 Delilah L. Beasley, "Slavery in California," Journal of Negro History, 3 (Jan.

1918), 33-44; Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Negro on the American Frontier (New York
1971); Savage, Blacks in the West, passim.
12 Durham and Jones, The Negro Cowboys (New York 1965); Leckie, The Buffalo
Soldiers, A Narrative of the Negro Calvary in the West (Norman, Okla. 1967); Katz, The
Black West (1971; 2nd ed., Garden City, N.Y. 1973); Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush Cali-
fornia (New Haven 1977); Billington, New Mexico's Buffalo Soldiers, 1866-1900 (Niwot,
Colo. 1991).
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
New Philadelphia and its founder offer a collective perspective on

how the American western towns were shaped and their significance
in the development of Illinois from a frontier state to a major indus-
trial and agricultural center. As Walker notes, Free Frank, "a man of
uncommon drive and determination, would have had historical signif-
icance, even had he not been black and formerly slave."16 Frank's
impressive achievements, and those of other black pioneers in the
West, not only belie Turner's "whites only" approach to frontier set-
tlement, but reveal how blacks challenged racism, exclusionary
"black codes," and discriminatory land-claiming practices.
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.
Other towns, almost exclusively black, emerged in antebellum

America and thereafter. They were, as Kenneth M. Hamilton ob-
served, "an integral part of the frontier urban settlement process"-
neither insignificant nor exceptional. Hamilton also maintained that
black and white men establishing black towns such as New Philadel-
phia in Illinois, Nicodemus in Kansas, Mound Bayou in Mississippi,
and Langston City in Oklahoma were driven by speculation and
profit rather than by racial tensions.17 But notwithstanding the moti-
vations of speculators and others promoting black towns, settlers and
their supporters had a different agenda. In most cases, black pioneers
who settled these communities expressed a sense of nationalism and a
desire to uplift themselves without the constraints of racism.
Yet, the frontier as a wellspring of democracy and a safety valve
in a Turnanian sense did not apply to African Americans. If the West
sometimes muted class status or caste, race-consciousness rarely
abated-although in instances where the black population was small,
and hence not threatening, as in Pike County, Illinois-African
Americans might coexist with whites in relative peace. For Free
Frank, the Illinois frontier provided a mechanism for economic op-
portunity that allowed him to secure a position of respect in Pike
County and to begin the process of freeing his large family. And some
free people of color found the West preferable to the East where racial
exclusion was entrenched, and certainly to the South where they were
little better off than slaves.
For African Americans, the frontier could provide an easing of
racial tensions if not a true safety valve. The unsettling, undeveloped,
solitary aspects of frontier existence appealed to a people who felt at
bay because of slavery and racism. Hence African Americans estab-
lished all-black towns, settled in sparsely populated regions of the
West, lived among Indians, and established communities of slaves on
the frontier. For African Americans, the frontier could mean auton-
omy and liberation, not because of the presence of American democ-
racy, institutions, and civilization, but precisely because of their
absence. Thus in an entirely different sense than Turner intended,
the frontier, while not a safety valve, could be a metaphor for free-
dom for African Americans.
Peter H. Wood's Black Majority, a study of early Carolina, sug-
gested a frontier theme for African Americans that scholars have ad-
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).
dressed and expanded. Wood depicted the outpost colony of Carolina

as a society where minimal social barriers existed prior to the success-
ful widespread introduction of rice culture. Originally, external dan-
gers, a diverse economy, and mutual dependence helped to provide a
measure of autonomy for Africans in early Carolina. However, the
large slave importations necessary for developing rice cultivation cou-
pled with black assertion led to mounting white anxiety, creating a
more firmly entrenched bondage system and repressive slave codes.
As the South Carolina frontier was transformed into a settled region,
black autonomy and initiative was stifled.18
Wood's implicit thesis involving the relationship of frontier condi-
tions to black autonomy and liberation is an important frame of refer-
ence for two important new studies. As early as 1848 and 1858,
writers had noted black presence in the Gulf of Mexico region and
their alliance with the Seminoles. Daniel Usner's Settlers, Indians and
Slaves in a Frontier Economy demonstrates how economics of the frontier
encouraged "a network of cross-cultural interaction" and how slaves
figured prominently in the Louisiana frontier as soldiers, traders,
boatmen, artisans, interpreters, hunters, herders, and peddlers. Their
open economic exchange, conducted with settlers and Indians, was
viewed with anxiety because the activity encouraged black initiative
and rebelliousness. The lower Mississippi Valley frontier afforded
mechanisms for slave defiance, as African Americans took advantage
of white dependency and shifting political and territorial boundaries.
Black participation in a frontier economy continued through the
1760s. By then Spain and Britain, in order to consolidate political
control of Louisiana and West Florida, enhanced economic produc-
tivity and promoted immigration of whites and slaves. These meas-
ures, as well as hostility from some Indian groups, checked black
autonomy, and the frontier economy was replaced by cotton culture.19
Gwendolyn Hall's work on colonial Louisiana further demon-
strates how the unsettling aspects of frontier existence could be liber-
ating for African Americans. Hall depicts frontier interactions as a
melange of white, black, and Indian clashes over independence, he-
gemony, and freedom. Indian resistance to land encroachments and
African resistance to bondage placed colonial Louisiana on a precari-
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.
ous footing. Black and Indian encounters intensified the problems

facing French and later Spanish settlers trying to turn a profit. Occa-
sional black-Indian alliance greatly alarmed the white settlers. As one
official noted, "the greatest misfortune which could befall the colony
and which would inevitably lead to its total loss would be the union
between the Indian nations and the black slaves." Great pains were
taken to encourage animosity between these two oppressed groups.20
More than solidarity with Indians, whose alliances vacillated, Af-
ricans viewed the uncharted frontier itself as a means to gain their
freedom. Cypress swamps, woodlands, and waterways beyond the
property lines of settlers became safe refuges for black fugitives. Afri-
cans moved skillfully along the waterways and set up their own "ma-
roon" communities in the cypress swamps. According to Hall, "a
network of cabins of runaway slaves arose behind plantations along
the rivers and bayous. Arms and ammunition were stored in the cab-
ins." Moreover, Louisiana marronage was a well-developed enter-
prise whose economic sustenance depended upon production and
trade carried on illegally with white settlers. Maroons "cultivated
crops, made articles of willow and reeds, hunted, fished, and fre-
quented New Orleans to trade and gamble."21
These frontier maroon communities were organized in families.
Hall finds that by 1780 the Louisiana frontier was dotted with ma-
roon settlements. They surrounded the plantations and asserted con-
trol over strategically vital parts of Louisiana between the Mississippi
River and New Orleans. Maroons were armed, had strong leader-
ship, and maintained a frontier economy. Although these communi-
ties eventually declined with the passing of the frontier, Hall
maintains that poor Louisiana whites owe their language and some
cultural adaptations to the runaway slaves whose vernacular and
economy they borrowed in the isolated countryside.22
One need not look only to Frederick Jackson Turner for analyses
of the frontier meaning. No one knew more than blacks, what it
meant to live on the margins of society, and often they preferred it
that way. From the perspective of metaphor, the meaning of the fron-
tier for African Americans goes beyond Turner's constricting inter-
20 Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the

Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge 1992), 97-103.
21 Ibid., 202-203.
22 Ibid., 236.
pretation. Fugitive slaves-Free Frank, John Brown, Martin

Delaney, and John Mercer Langston-are only a few who realized
the importance of a frontier, of movement and expansionism in ad-
dressing black self-determination. For African American history,
Turner's thesis is significant not only because he provided a challenge
to his generation of black historians, but also because his historical
blind spot encouraged future scholars of the black experience to em-
ploy Turner's own guidelines to reveal the flaws in his perspectives
and go beyond his narrow parameters in defining the meaning of the
frontier.
Grasping for the Significance of the Turner Legacy:

An Afterword
John Lauritz Larson

For one hundred years American historians have been writing under
the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, and if the
force and character of Turner's legacy has changed over time, these
centennial essays demonstrate Turner's enduring capacity to engage
serious writers who dare to interpret American history. A century
ago, in a hot Chicago lecture room, to an audience apparently una-
ware of its historic good fortune, Turner sketched out a conceptual
framework and laid down interpretive challenges that have inspired,
constrained, or bedeviled historians of the United States like no other
single piece of scholarship. If Turner's disciples never succeeded in
proving the master's many speculations, a legion of critics has yet to
escape completely the terms of Turner's formulations. Historians
shrink from declaring anything unique, but Turner's frontier thesis
stands alone among a century's production of books, essays, and
monographic studies all striving, in Turner's words, to "explain
American development."'
John Lauritz Larson, Associate Professor of History, Purdue University, is

the author of Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's
Railway Age (1984) and numerous articles on internal improvement and the West.
1 Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History," in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Ray Allen
Billington (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1961), 37.

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African American History and the Frontier Thesis

"Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portions of

Frederick Jackson Turner and other historians of the Progressive Era,

Margaret Washington, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University, is

Turner). Turner's biographer, Ray Allen Billington, noted that

3 Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American

4 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. The Mythology of the American

frontier held experiential possibilities for African Americans that are

In 1902, Richard R. Wright, Jr., noted that the black presence

6 Richard R. Wright, "Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers," in Au-

sources still afford historians an opportunity write the African Ameri-

11 Delilah L. Beasley, "Slavery in California," Journal of Negro History, 3 (Jan.

New Philadelphia and its founder offer a collective perspective on

Other towns, almost exclusively black, emerged in antebellum

dressed and expanded. Wood depicted the outpost colony of Carolina

ous footing. Black and Indian encounters intensified the problems

20 Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the

pretation. Fugitive slaves-Free Frank, John Brown, Martin

Grasping for the Significance of the Turner Legacy:

John Lauritz Larson

John Lauritz Larson, Associate Professor of History, Purdue University, is

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