Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  At first there was little to distinguish one of their cabins from those of the tribes that preceded them. But Tocqueville saw through this class of American pioneer:

  Nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings. The traveler who approaches one . . . towards nightfall sees the flicker of the hearth flame through the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees. Who could not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and ignorance? Yet no sort of comparison can be drawn between the pioneer and the dwelling that shelters him. Everything about him is primitive and wild, but he is himself the result of the labor and experience of eighteen centuries. He wears the dress and speaks the language of cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the present; he is in short a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers.

  There was as little of the European peasant in these farmer folk as in the preceding hunter-trappers and hunter-settlers. The farmer-settlers were enormously industrious, however; their instinct was not merely to conquer the frontier but to destroy it. They put their sweat into their farms, and their first painful capital into barns or new improvements. They gradually erected comfortable frame houses and filled them with clean-lined if plain furniture they made themselves. They quick-burned timber, to get a crop in, but then they year by year tore out the rocks and stumps. The American farmer-settler was stubborn, intelligent, literate, self-reliant almost to a fault, and suffused with what was now a discernible middle-class, democratic bias. These farmers considered themselves the salt of the earth.

  They worked very hard, for the most part; they "got ahead" and could see the visible results of their work, and despised most people who did not or could not do the same. They rarely got rich. A man could only work so much good land, and hard money, always, tended to be extremely scarce on the older frontier. Landowners, even if small, they much preferred money inflation to more sober times. They grudgingly respected those richer than they, but remained suspicious or derisive of the gentry or any whose success gave them social airs. They became the backbone of the countryside; they planted a strong, cohesive, eminently successful if colorless Anglo-Saxon culture in the land.

  Besides the corn, melons, and squash raised for food, beef, wheat, and tobacco began to be produced in surplus. Cotton—at first always a crop for capitalistic enterprise—came later. Horse culture came very early across the mountains, and flourished particularly in Kentucky. Tobacco, some sold upriver as evil "stogies," and horses soon created an economy in which there were a few more luxuries than the first two emblazoned forever on the American frontier: the bowl of cherries and an apple pie.

  Schools, demanded by the Puritan instinct, were established everywhere. Few communities were unable to support a young New Englander with some learning, or perhaps an Irish immigrant who had seen better days. Boys and girls went to school together. They learned everything their society required them to know: reading the Testament, spelling, and simple figures. Schoolteachers were almost always immigrants from outside, usually young, usually going on to better things—almost a tradition on the American frontier. They enjoyed universal respect in this consciously building society.

  The Western frontier, strangely, did not so much loosen social bonds as remake or re-cement them. The first stock into the old Southwest was not truly "Southern"; most of it came originally out of Pennsylvania. People from every state in the original thirteen followed. One of the phenomena of the frontier South, however, was that it quickly created its own American patina, its own folklore, and its own dominant ethic. There were no real cities to enhance but at the same time fragment culture and conditions on the early frontier did not permit the formation of enclaves. Everyone was thrown together. Lutherans were buried in Methodist cemeteries; the few Roman Catholics who wandered to the frontier married into, and were lost in, the Puritan mainstream. This mixed people, basically British and at least one-quarter Celt, became everywhere very much alike, over wide distances.

  If the Scotch-Irish disintegrated as a distinct race, they stamped their ethic, their notion of democracy, their biases, and their energy across the whole region, which was immortality enough. What was continued was the remarkable Anglo-American culture of intense order without formal restraint. An early settler of Kentucky, who had become a judge, wrote James Madison:

  We are as harmonious among ourselves as can be expected of a mixture of people from various States, and of various Sentiments and Manners not yet assimilated. In point of Morals . . . the inhabitants are far superior to what I expected to find in any new settled country. We have not had a single instance of Murder, and but one Criminal for Felony . . . I wish I could say as much to vindicate the character of our Land-jobbers. This business is attended with much Villainy.

  In this increasingly tribal society on the vanishing frontier, there was one deep flaw, generally as unpalatable to later Americans as the pattern of Indian warfare. Land was the source of most wealth, but it was also the source of most trouble. Land speculation, in a "land-poor" region, was continuous. Land ownership was often difficult to define. Paper money was issued by state wildcat banks, not on the basis of solid deposits but on acres of undeveloped land. There was continual litigation, land booms and busts, which ruined many families and forced many others to move on. Some of this speculation in public lands—everything up to the Mississippi became "public" lands in 1783, and twenty years later the Louisiana Territory entered the federal soil reservoir—had national implications and effects, and one financial panic was instrumental in sending the first American colonists to Texas.

  Men acquired public lands in various ways, mostly by buying up legitimate government purchases or grants; then they speculated wildly in them, without developing them, ruining credit and currency, destroying established prices. There was more land, most of the time, than the economy could afford. A lasting American class, the land speculator (ironically often called a "developer"), was soon born.

  But the settlers who were able to put down roots prospered reasonably. Nowhere was there much luxury, or one-tenth the specie that passed through the City of Mexico, until the last great class of immigrants from the seaboard passed over the Appalachians.

  These were the people of means, who in the 18th and 19th centuries referred to themselves as gentlefolk. These were the planters, successful merchants, and lawyers. There was a lasting American tradition that this class, if it could be called a true class, itself sprang up or arose on the frontier. But this was rarely the pattern. The rich merchant usually came with merchandise and mercantile instinct from somewhere else, often Pennsylvania; he was sometimes Scotch-Irish, but not the trader who had first opened a primitive post on the stockaded frontier. The lawyers, who were indispensable once the West had joined the States, brought their education with them from the older regions. The planters, who more than anyone else resembled a true social class rather than a status elite, invariably carried capital, in the form of acquired land titles and Negro slaves, from the English tidewater, or at least the area behind the hills. The merchant and the lawyer came West for obvious reasons, just as the lawyer and merchant, in colonial America, had frequently left the New England or Middle Atlantic States for the far South. In a new, building country opportunity was greater. But the plantation agriculture of the South, with its tobacco, was also ruining miles of lands. There were new empires that a man with know-how, connections, and a handful of slaves could create beyond the blue mountains.

  All these groups, which formed the commercial, legal, and educated elite any highly organized society required, came looking for good situations in the West. They came after the war whoop and the screams of Indian victims had passed away, but not so far behind that they could not be considered true pioneers or makers of the l
and. Some came from families "already high on the Atlantic slope"; many merely claimed to. If a man said he came from Virginia and displayed civilized manners, his claim to gentility was honored. The Anglo-Celt vanguard rarely mentioned, and actually had forgotten, its antecedents. Few of the first pioneers, after a generation or two, could trace their ancestry behind the Cumberland Gap, or wanted to.

  The new elite, which filled a void and in a rather hostile world clung instinctively to itself, did bring education, skills, capital, and manners to the middle border. It also brought less popular things: Negro slavery and uneasy concepts of social class.

  The mercantile and professional elite sought the burgeoning sites of future cities, while the planters acquired suitable lands. The groups tended to merge. Successful lawyers married into plantation families, and rich merchants deliberately, following ancient English social instincts, purchased land. Even in America the manure pile had a more genteel odor than the counting-house. The coming elite, then, did not settle everywhere. The plantation economy required flatlands. The planters acquired acres in the grasslands, in the river bottoms, or in the black belts. The hardscrabble hills were left to the hunter-settlers, huge enclaves of which held fast in western Virginia and eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. But the governments, the tone, and the manners outside the mountain regions, and of the states themselves, gradually became dominated by the planter class. They had the money, the assurance, and the time to devote to politics. Their understanding of, and connections with, important men in the old states gave these men definite advantages. The settlements might, and frequently did, elect representatives in coonskin hats, but the beaver-topped planter dominated the community.

  In a country where men were very similar and conditions of life much the same, the planters and mercantile elite differentiated themselves in several annoying ways. They created, or tried to, limited genteel social circles, on the order of Williamsburg or York. They built imposing houses and introduced a custom until then utterly foreign to the frontier: the concept of hospitality. The Anglo-Celt tended to be suspicious of strangers, and even churlish to people outside his clan or ken. The planters imported clothes and furnishings from the East or even Europe. They made a fetish of sending their children back across the mountains to school.

  If the lawyers were invaluable to the organic continuance of the community, and essential once the West began to enter the Union as states, they also aroused antagonisms. The frontiersman had needed no legal talent to face the requirements of his existence. The lawyers brought social history and familiarity with the concepts of Anglo-Saxon law and justice. But they also carried along land titles, lawsuits, and a whole frightening bag of tricks that frequently dissolved the frontiersman's possession of his blood-won ground. Noticeably, in the folklore of both the old and the later West, the lawyer, like the banker, is rarely cast as hero. The small farmer and pioneer detested the orator who could neither plow nor fight Indians, who inevitably dominated political offices, and who invariably sided with the most-propertied class.

  The merchant came closest, in modern social parlance, to being a class enemy to the farmer. The merchant made possible the arrival of goods and the rise of comfort on the frontier and filled a very necessary void, but the antagonism of a people who never quite had enough money to buy is understandable. The feeling was more psychological than political.

  All of these inheritors of the old frontier were perhaps envied, but not disliked for their material success. The functional Anglo-America of the West already had a great respect for, and mythology about, material success. It was perfectly proper to build two-story brick houses; the real tension between planter and dirt farmer was the former's pretensions to social class. In a Puritan ethos there was no real place for the role of the gentleman. What emerged was a sort of uneasy compromise. The planter adopted, quietly, his pretensions to gentility; the strongly puritanical majority of the country studiously ignored the pretensions, and only became furious if they were flaunted in their faces.

  The planter, however, was not so much a gentleman as a working capitalist. He bought land, raised cash crops, and with the surplus quickly produced, invested in more land, to the extent of his luck, ability, and desire. The blot on this successful agriculture was the planter's employment of and dependence on Negro slaves. Strangely, by the turn of the 19th century human slavery was firmly imbedded across what was one of the most egalitarian areas of earth. The frontierspeople who went west both above and below the Ohio were initially very much the same. But slavery, and the quick imposition of a capitalist plantation economy in the South, created very different societies. The first prosperity, on the surface, was won handily by the South, which was soon a surplus-producing region, with a viable upper class. But the Northwest Territory had two advantages. The Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery, and its climate was unsuited for the then richest cash crops. The old Northwest Territory was to be spared the social residue of Negro slavery for almost two hundred years.

  Slavery eroded certain values on the formerly free frontier. It also produced race hatred. The frontiersmen disliked human slavery both in theory and practice, and it took no great effort to extend this feeling to the slaves, with whom they were hard put to compete. When the first planter in a new community came to a cooperative house- or barn-raising, and watched while his "niggers" sweated shoulder to shoulder with a throng of poorer whites, a stain was thrown over the whole frontier. The free farmers disliked planters, but hated Negroes, somewhat illogically fixing the victims with the system's blame. Negroes were hated next to Indians, because the frontiersmen found it harder to hate people that they much more despised. The Indian seemed to have some admirable qualities; the unfortunate black, to white frontiersmen, had none.

  Except for the institution of slavery, the rising gentry on the border South would have been unable to establish caste. They were not, and never would have been, an aristocracy in the European sense. They might be mainly Episcopalian, but they were not free from the Calvinistic pressure of cause and effect. Theodore Roosevelt's description of this class is significant, in a way he himself, a conscious member of the old American gentry, probably never understood:

  Their inheritance of sturdy and self-reliant manhood helped them greatly; their blood told in their favor as blood generally does tell when other things are equal. If they prized intellect they prized character more; they were strong in body and mind, stout of heart, and resolute of will. They felt that pride of race which spurs a man to effort, instead of making him feel he is excused from effort. They realized that the qualities they inherited from their forefathers ought to be further developed by them as their forefathers originally developed theirs. They knew that their blood and breeding, though making it probable that they would with proper effort succeed, yet entitled them to no success which they could not fairly earn in open contest with their rivals.

  The planters of Kentucky and Tennessee were, like the rest of Americans, a driven class; they concerned themselves with matters such as success, which no true aristocrat would understand. Under Roosevelt's biases, the truth comes through. These were whiskey-drinking Puritans, as deeply imbued with the American ethic as the hard-nosed, farming middle class.

  The Southern frontier, then, like a vast horde of jungle ants, moved inexorably toward the Mississippi. There was order in the seemingly chaotic march. And, common to all English-speaking societies, there was something of the anthill in its industriousness, its internal order, and its individual discipline, which differed from those of the American North only in slight degree. Nowhere was there anything of the stubborn mysticism of the Spaniard, or the individualism of the French, both of which required imposed restraint. The Anglo-Saxon built his own prisons and lived in them cheerfully.

  First came a swarm of free frontiersmen, more belligerent and daring than ambitious. They were followed by a larger swarm, narrow-minded in its economic preoccupation, but industrious. Finally, there arrived a growing class that styled its
elf as an elite. This class stamped manners, thought, and custom, but otherwise hardly impinged upon the others. Meanwhile, the frontier experience threw these separate ethnic and social components together, making one common people out of many.

  A permanent, and lasting, single people was created along the Southern frontier, out of shared experience and a sense of common destiny. A true nation was made. Unfortunately, as history unfolded in other parts of the Anglo-American continent, this Southern frontier was to become something of a nation within a larger nation. All Americans did not share its outlook and experience. The great majority of people never left the East while there was a frontier, and other millions, by coming late, avoided the struggle for the continent altogether.

  It was no part of their history; they took little pride in it, and were never influenced by the sense of race, blood, and common soil it engendered.