so. To a historian, knowing what a word meant and how its definition shifted over time can help reconstruct the way people experienced their past, show the way they used words to explain their present, and explain the course of the history these people made.
Frontier is such a word. Colonists used frontier to describe the world as they understood it. Specifically, a frontier in early America was a zone that people considered vulnerable to invasion, one that was created when colonists feared an onslaught from imperial rivals and other enemies. As such, it was a word that colonists used to explain their geopolitical landscape. For our purposes, an English dictionary published in 1776, the year Jefferson cited attacks on “our frontiers” as a reason to declare independence, distills the way that people thought of a frontier at the time of the American Revolution: “the border, confine, or boundary of a kingdom or province, which the enemies find in the front when they are about to enter the same.”5
According to this definition, a version of which appeared in print at least as early as 1730, frontier zones were the opposite of how they appear in today’s popular imagination. Frontiers were not areas of active expansion, exploration, and economic opportunity; they were contingent (a clear enemy threat created such zones), defensive (threatened areas required fortifications to ward off an assault), and prone to contraction (if a colony failed to adequately fortify a frontier, then the enemy would be able to push the borders of the territory inward). So defined, frontiers were often specific communities that an enemy would attack first as part of a larger invasion. Indeed, a later dictionary copied the 1776 definition verbatim and added, “thus we say, a frontier town, frontier province.”6
As political theorists developed the idea of the early modern state, frontiers defined in this way became important parts of the larger body politic in which they existed. Frontiers were the limbs of a polity; they warded off assault and provided the first and most important protection for the heart, or capital region. The relationship between these two parts was thus based on reciprocity. While a frontier helped protect the heart, frontiers themselves depended upon the heart—the capital, the government—for sustenance and support. A diseased political body saw its frontiers wither, while a healthy political body, one that had a strong heart, sustained its limbs. As Walter Raleigh wrote in the early seventeenth century, “As health and soundness of the hands, legs, and other outward members cannot continue life, unless the heart and vital spirits within be strong and firm; so fortifications and Frontier-defences do not prevail.” Such a conception of frontier crossed the Atlantic with British colonists, who adapted their language to describe their new geopolitical terrain, with officials and colonists often describing their various frontiers as “naked,” “open,” and “exposed,” a desperate situation that demanded more military aid from the government.7
This reciprocal relationship, one in which those on the frontiers provided the heart of the polity with some measure of protection while those in the heart supplied the support necessary to ward off an attack, formed the fundamental contract between the government and the governed that was so important to those living in the early modern world. In fact, it was on frontiers that early modern governments were made or lost, especially colonial initiatives that projected power into North America. Benjamin Franklin expressed such an understanding when he declared in his popular pamphlet Great Britain Reconsidered that “the Frontier of any dominion being attack’d, it becomes not merely ‘the cause’ of the people immediately affected, (the inhabitants of that Frontier) but properly ‘the cause’ of the whole body. Where Frontier People owe and pay obedience, there they have a right to look for protection. No political proposition is better established than this.”8
In short, frontier was a politically potent word in the eighteenth century. A successful frontier policy was supposed to make “frontier people” feel secure. As Franklin noted, in exchange for this security “frontier people owe and pay obedience” to their government. If the government ignored their pleas or failed to protect them against an attack, then anxiety could turn into anger so strong that it would break the bonds between the governed and the governed. As Franklin concluded, “No political proposition is better established”; it was an essential part of governing in early America.
The structure of the British Empire in North America meant that most colonies were responsible for providing for their own frontiers. In fact, most colonies passed laws from their inception to aid areas designated as such because providing security was where a colony began. Governing frontiers was thus essential to the success or failure of colonial projects. It was in these zones that colonies proved they could maintain their fundamental obligation to their constituents. If a colony could manage its frontier regions and provide the type of protection colonists sought, then the colony would secure the fundamental contract between the Crown and its peoples. From there, colonies could help establish the rest of their governing capacities and serve larger imperial aims. Such a process played out in most British colonies early in their history, as colonists waged a series of wars against their Indian neighbors or their European competitors. These colonies established militias, raised taxes to support wars, and crafted policies to strengthen frontier regions, often by encouraging more colonists to settle in them. Indeed, most colonies from their founding successfully integrated frontier policy into their governing with little controversy. They were, as William Penn described New York in 1701, “a frontier government.”9
Pennsylvania, however, avoided a direct confrontation with a European rival or a major war with its Native neighbors for the first seventy-three years of its existence. Influenced by the pacifist ideals of its founder, William Penn, government officials took pride in their good Indian relations, often boasting that their model for colonization was superior to that of other colonies. They also benefited from their location, protected on the east by New Jersey and with New York as a buffer from French Canada. From 1681 until the 1750s, Pennsylvania flourished because it was able to win the loyalty of its colonists through peace and prosperity, providing colonists with a sense of security without warfare against Indians or European adversaries. In short, Pennsylvania lacked frontier regions because no one feared invasion. While that history makes Pennsylvania different from other British colonies in North America, it also makes the role of frontiers in early America particularly revealing.
After war with an external enemy finally came to the region in the 1750s when joint French and Indian raids attacked Pennsylvanian settlements during the Seven Years’ War, many Pennsylvanians who faced such deadly incursions believed their homes in a once peaceful countryside now formed a dangerous frontier. They sought the same militarization for their communities that other British colonies had long offered their colonists. In the postwar years, the period marked by rebellions like that of the Paxton Boys, colonial and imperial officials wanted to reestablish security on former frontiers through peace with Indians and demilitarization. But colonists in the region demanded a very different policy, one more akin to the defensive and militaristic one adopted by most other colonies that continued to act as if they had a frontier region to protect. Thus, the fundamental bond between frontier people and their government began to break down in Pennsylvania as these views diverged in the 1760s. The governing crisis created on the colony’s frontiers—indeed a disagreement between colonists and their colonial and imperial governments over whether the colony even contained frontiers—would only be solved by a revolution that would overthrow the colonial establishment and create a new governing contract on the terms frontier people demanded.
“Distresses of a Frontier Man”
To introduce these eighteenth-century “frontier people,” let us turn to one of their most astute chroniclers, Hector St. John Crevecoeur, author of the famous work Letters from an American Farmer. Crevecoeur traveled throughout British North America in the 1760s and wrote about the people he met and the society he observed. Crevecoeur’s perceptions were so shrewd that his book is still required reading for people seeking to understand eighteenth-century North America. As his biographers say, with little hesitation, “His writings show more detailed knowledge of American geography and life of the settlers than those of any other writer of the period.”
