The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

“A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” by its settlers, “at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public. Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for the settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.”

that the ideal of modern liberty, founded on property rights, can be traced back hundreds of years to Saxon Germany.

Citizens spread thin over a wide territory would be less likely to join “common interest or passion,” to become “united and actuated” in their objectives, to “discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Expansion would break up society “into a greater variety of interests and pursuits of passions, which check each other.” The amalgamation of power would be prevented, making it unnecessary to take government action, either to regulate concentrated wealth or to repress movements

“Extend the sphere,” Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” and you make it difficult for either a mob majority or a tyrannical minority to unite “to invade the rights of other citizens.”

at a time when reigning international law recognized war, conquest, and subjugation as valid means of obtaining territory and establishing sovereignty.

So Spanish America, starting in the 1820s, formed in effect the world’s prototype league of nations, the first cooperative confederacy of republics: a community of sovereign, bounded, non-imperial, anti-colonial, formally equal and independent countries that rejected the legitimacy of aggression and vowed to resolve conflicts through multinational diplomacy.

“We shall push our trading houses,” Jefferson wrote to Indiana’s territorial governor in 1803, the year he acquired Louisiana, and “be glad” when Native Americans fell into debt and had to sell their land.

Jefferson said, “will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.”

Dispossessed of over twenty million acres, the Creeks were, according to the treaty’s text, “reduced to extreme want” and denied “the means of subsistence.” A once self-sufficient people were made dependent on government corn—which,

Jefferson disliked him intensely, saying he was “much alarmed” at the idea of Jackson becoming president: “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions.… His passions are terrible … he is a dangerous man.”

Jackson sensed the tension in the founders, of wanting it all but not wanting to do all it took to have it all.

The Jacksonians had a simpler solution, which aligned theory, or desire, with action: remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, and defend and extend slavery.

“A proletarian orgy” was how one writer later recalled the scene at Jackson’s inauguration, as the president’s crude supporters “descended upon the city like a great swarm of locusts, by stagecoach, cart, and wagon, on horseback and on foot.”

different direction. He responded to the growing complexity of daily life by promising to bring back “primitive simplicity and purity,” to “restore” government institutions to what he said was their original minimal design.

A minimalist vision of federal power—supported by new legal doctrines offered by slavers and their defenders, among them nullification, “state sovereignty,” and states’ rights—was meant to legally arm the South against an increasingly hostile and abolitionist North.

Mobilized to defend a system of racial domination, the ideal of a limited federal government is itself inescapably racialized.

The Age of Jackson, or what some scholars have called the Jacksonian consensus, entailed a radical empowerment of white men. At the same time, though, it witnessed an equally radical subjugation of African Americans. “The adoption of universal white male suffrage,” wrote the historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., in 1970, “led directly to the disenfranchisement of black males who had voted since the colonial period.” As chattel cotton slavery spread into the Deep South, into Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, free people of color (that is, former slaves or descendants of slaves who had gained their emancipation through manumission, escape, or, in northern states, abolition) saw their rights greatly curtailed, with new second-class-citizenship laws passed in many states. “As Jacksonian democracy reached new heights,” Bennett continued, “racism in America reached levels never before known to man.” “Poor whites rose” and “poor blacks were pushed down.” But poor whites could only rise so far in cramped cities and squalid quarters, earning low wages and paying high rent. Many, looking around at their miserable conditions, began to organize workingmen’s and mechanics’ associations and to ask the same question Jackson asked of his encounter on the Trace: “Are we freemen or are we slaves?” The Indian Removal Act let Jackson answer: freemen. The act, which Jackson signed into law in early 1830, about a year

This first removal resulted in about twenty-five million acres of formerly Indian land, including large tracts of Georgia and Alabama, freed up for the market and slave economy. Jackson’s predecessor, John Quincy Adams, had tried to use the proceeds generated by the sale of western public land to fund what he called a “national program,” to build roads and canals but also hospitals, schools, and other social institutions. Jackson, though, pledged to “put an end forever” to this “subversive” use of public land for government revenue. He instead started to distribute, or let states distribute, land at low cost to his slaver and frontier constituents, to those Jackson called the “adventurous and hardy,” the “true friends of liberty.”28

An anonymous artillery officer, writing from east Florida to the Charleston Courier in 1838, described the horrors he had helped inflict on the recalcitrant Seminoles. He and his fellow soldiers had driven them “into the swamps and unwholesome places of their country,” where they clung “with the last efforts of despair to their beloved homes.”

The Indian Removal Act, in addition to removing Native Americans, mandated the federal government to protect Native Americans once they were removed. The United States was to assure removed nations that it would “forever secure and guaranty” their new lands and protect them from “all interruption or disturbance” from “any other person or persons whatever.”

But to hold to the letter of those documents and to treat Indian Country as a foreign sovereign power would give an opening to European rivals,

John Quincy Adams knew that this rotation—with Indians finding themselves inside, outside, then inside the boundary once more—couldn’t go on forever. The continent was vast but not infinite. “In the instances of the New-York Indians removed to Green Bay, and of the Cherokees removed to the Territory of Arkansas,” he wrote in his private diary in 1828, the last full year of his presidency, “we have scarcely given them time to build their wigwams before we are called upon by our own people to drive them out again.” The best policy, he confided to himself, would be assimilation, to make Native Americans equal citizens.

The Indian “is a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one passion save by the ravenous demands of another … These people must die out,” Greeley said. “God has given

the spread of capitalism—with its low wages, high prices of basic goods, and even higher rents—placed increasing pressure on the family structure. In order to survive, many households moved west.

Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.

Rape was an instrument of this refinement. Enslaved women were, as defenders of slavery put it, “safety valves,” helping to redirect the lust of white men away from white women and allowing southerners to distinguish their section of the country as genteel and mannerly.

For slavery’s opponents, the implacable hatred large segments of white people directed at freed people—manifest in new laws disenfranchising African American men, in the segregation of housing, education, and public services, and in a panic concerning “amalgamation,” or intermarriage—suggested that the evil created by slavery would outlive the institution of slavery, that abolition wouldn’t abolish the problem racial inequality posed to the promise of republican equality.

Aside from dissident voices such as Wright, advocates and adversaries of slavery joined together to push for colonization, which the Pennsylvania affiliate of the American Colonization Society said was “the only safety valve to our domestic slave question.” That “only” bears weight, carrying both an appreciation of the forces aligned against equality and an accommodation to their power. Thousands of emancipated African

The extremity of life and work on the frontier lands of the Deep South was itself a valve. When a Virginia planter was asked, in 1840, if he feared for his life at the hands of his slaves, he said he had no such worries. The hardness of the frontier offered him protection. “God, in his Providence, had opened for them a safety valve in the extreme southern states, which purchased their slaves and worked them to death in seven years.”

An early list of the demands of Free Soilers reveals as militant a program as ever advanced in U.S. politics: Vote yourself a farm; Down with monopolists; Freedom of public lands; Homesteads made inalienable; Abolition of all laws for the collection of debt; Equal rights for women with men in all respects; Abolition of chattel slavery and wage slavery.

practice, “free land” didn’t serve this function, for the most part. Speculators, railroads, ranchers, and corporations were claiming the best of

the way the effects of one war became the cause of the next,

In the hope of keeping the settlers loyal, Spanish officials promised them land (the more slaves they had, the more land they were granted) and freedom (that is, a hands-off policy when it came to trading and slaving).

when Mexico won its independence in 1821 and, shortly thereafter, abolished slavery.

(Later, in the run-up to the U.S. Civil War, Texas became the last stop on an underground railroad running in reverse: slavers kidnapped freedmen and women from other places and re-enslaved them in Texas. Mexico tried to shut it down, but Texas effectively reestablished an international slave trade; Galveston, in the late 1830s, became the largest slave market west of New Orleans.)

Now, he warned, a fight with Mexico over Texas would deepen the nation’s habituation to racist wars, leading to the point where racism and war would be the only thing that gave the republic meaning.

“By force or by compact,” the federal government had expelled: all the Indian tribes from their own territories and dwellings, to a region beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Missouri, beyond the Arkansas, bordering upon Mexico; and there you have deluded them with the hope that they will find a permanent abode—a final resting place from your never ending rapacity and persecution. There you have undertaken to lead the willing, and to drive the reluctant, by fraud or by force; by treaty, or by the sword and the rifle; all the remnants of the Seminoles, of the Creeks, of the Cherokees, of the Choctaws, and of how many other tribes I cannot now stop to enumerate. In the process of this violent and heartless operation, you have met with all the resistance which men in so helpless a condition as that of the Indian tribes, could make.

Their raids on settlers were the “last convulsive struggles of their despair.”

Directing his anger at the speaker of the House, James Knox Polk, whom Adams addressed as “the slave-holder sitting in the chair,” he asked: Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian, emancipator of slaves, and abolisher of slavery? Is your southern and southwestern frontier not sufficiently extensive?… Are you not large and unwieldy enough already? Have you not Indians enough to expel from the land of their fathers’ sepulchres, and to exterminate?

Adams eventually came to his main point: that the promotion of what he described as one endless frontier war would soon boomerang home, leading to war against slavery in the heartland.

A comparison with Europe is instructive. In 1848, on the day of John Quincy Adams’s death, European workers revolted, with uprisings starting in Paris and then spreading to Vienna, Prague, Hamburg, Lyon, Milan, Palermo, Amsterdam, Budapest, Munich, Berlin, Naples, and elsewhere. Insurgents built barricades out of cobbles and waved the red flag, cutting society in two, as Alexis de Tocqueville later put it: uniting those who possessed nothing against those who possessed everything. The insurgents were defeated, but their revolt began the social-democratization of European politics, which eventually came to entail the growth of unions, the establishment of labor parties, and the extension of what came to be called social, or economic, rights, including the rights to welfare, education, health care, and pensions. The United States too had crowded cities and hungry workers, fighting efforts to subordinate their lives to mechanical routine. But instead of waging class war upward—on aristocrats and owners—they waged race war outward, on the frontier.

Expansion, though, had a corrosive effect, habituating, as Adams feared, the nation to war.

When the war was over, some soldiers went back east, to New England’s manufacturing towns or to New York’s Bowery, their war-sharpened racism working its way into local politics, labor associations, and the Free Soil movement.27 Others spread out into the newly conquered western land, into California and up into Oregon. They were armed with federally supplied rifles and an ample stock of bullets, ready to deal with Native Americans the way they had with Mexicans. “A war of extermination,”

would go on to transform the first premise of liberalism—that people have a “right to life”—into a new socialized “right to health and health care.”

Writing at the end of World War II, Polanyi said that this clash brought about by industrial capitalism—between an expanding sense of possibility and an equally expanding experience of destruction—led to “knowledge of society,” a realization that the freedom created by industrial growth did have limits, and that laissez-faire, if left unchecked, could destroy on the same scale that it created.

ever there was a time for the birth of a social republic—for an end to expansionist morality, where the solution to all problems was to flee forward—this was it. The South was under military occupation, its plantations seized and planter class surviving at the sufferance of its vanquishers. But that social republic was not to be.

So their shared, already-understood animosity to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which needed nothing but laughter and hisses to convey, made it easy for the president to shift all the many problems of post–Civil War America—its corruption, concentration of power, low wages, and inadequate housing—onto African Americans and their “blood-sucker” advocates in Congress, radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips, who were trying to fund the bureau.

The Wallowa white settlers had followed the Civil War and Reconstruction closely, and they knew of Howard’s reputation. Though far removed from the South, they nonetheless had carried forth a Jacksonian hostility to federal power and were ready to treat Howard the way the general was treated by southern whites.

By this point, in the middle of the 1870s, white vigilantism against African Americans had grown so intense that President Ulysses S. Grant considered trying to acquire the Dominican Republic as a homeland for freedmen and women. Grant had initiated his annexation effort prior to a massacre that took place on Easter Sunday 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, which left between sixty-two and a hundred and fifty African Americans dead at the hands of a white mob.

The bureaucratic machinery for western expansion—including the Department of Agriculture, the Morrill Land-Grant Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the Homestead Act—was put in place even before the Civil War had ended. In fact, the ability of the Union to win the war, historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman write, was based on a trade-off. Men could “enlist to fight for Lincoln and liberty, and receive, as fair recompense for their patriotic sacrifices, higher education and Western land connected by rail to markets. It seemed possible that liberty and empire might advance in lock step.”22