Often overlooked, however, is the book’s last chapter, titled “Distresses of a Frontier Man.” His treatment of the “frontier man” provides a window into the lives of the people who form the subject of his book.10
“Distresses of a Frontier Man” is set at the beginning of the American Revolution. Crevecoeur’s protagonist, whose name is James, lives on a farm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In Crevecoeur’s earlier essays, the farm represented hope and opportunity. Though isolated, James nonetheless feels connected to the rest of society through his bountiful harvests that tied James’s labors to the rest of the society through the market. But in the final chapter, war has turned his farm into a place of fear, desperation, and isolation, a living death. The fear of invasion looms in all that he does, and life itself becomes muted. Night is the worst time. “Whichever way” James looks, he sees “the most frightful precipices.” When he looks to the mountains, he imagines “our dreadful enemy” racing down its ramparts and destroying his farm. Darkness “renders these incursions still more terrible.” That is when the invasions most often come, or at least, that is when the dread of them most haunts James’s imaginings. Daytime is not much better. “We never go out in the fields,” James tells his friend, “but we are seized with an involuntary fear, which lessens our strength and weakens our labor.”11
Fear interrupts the simple rhythms of life. Wracked by constant anxiety, James and his family lose their appetites and “eat just enough to keep alive.” When they do find the energy to eat, “the slightest noise” disrupts meals and sends his family seeking cover. Their sleep is “disturbed by the most frightful dreams.” Although James and his wife try to protect their children, every morning the young ones wake with tales of their nighttime horrors. Sometimes the howl of James’s dogs stirs him from sleep and sends him running for his gun, while his wife takes the children to the cellar where they await the onslaught of Indians. “Fear industriously increases every sound” as James stands by his windows, his hands clutching his gun, expecting to receive fire at any moment: “We remain thus sometimes for whole hours, our hearts and minds racked by the most anxious suspense: what a dreadful situation, a thousand times worse than that of a soldier engaged in the most severe conflict!” Stories of “successive acts of devastation” spread through frontier homes, “and these told in chimney-corners, swell themselves in our affrighted imaginations into the most terrific ideas!” Fear more than actual warfare defines frontier society for James and his neighbors.12
Crevecoeur’s depiction is more than mere fiction. The historical record bears out the sentiments he conveys. The emotions of that came while being holed up in their small homes, huddled around fires, fearing that an attack would come any moment, forged a distinct sense of self: a frontier people, a political identity that shaped the actions of anyone who believed that they were such a person. Treating frontier on its own terms gives us a way to understand how colonists and Europeans imagined the spaces they inhabited and how this imagination shaped their politics.13
“A Strange State of Society”
Frontiers should not be confused with our idea of borders. The two were not synonymous in the eighteenth century, though as geopolitical regions in a colony they could overlap. Frontiers appeared at moments of war to mark the colonial settlements vulnerable to invasion. And there were many different frontiers, depending on who was doing the strategizing. There were imperial frontiers that referred to the empire’s holdings and could stretch across colonies and into areas not yet acquired. And there were colonial frontiers that were specific to a colony and required the attention of governors and legislatures. That is, grand strategists in England could draw clear, often contiguous lines to mark areas of expected invasion, while those tasked with governing colonies could imagine more local zones of invasion with greater specificity than those in the faraway halls of London. And finally, living on a frontier was a real experience for colonists who inhabited such zones. Sometimes these three perspectives agreed on where frontiers existed, and sometimes they did not. But even when they disagreed, there was general consensus about what a frontier was: a zone of potential, if not active, assault from an external enemy.
Borders, in contrast, were more permanent, though their specific location could be just as contested as the location of frontiers. Colonial governments, rather than the empire, most often dealt with establishing the exact location of the political borders that separated colonies from one another and distinguished between Native American land and colonial land. Colonies thus possessed many different borders that they often had to manage simultaneously. At their founding, colonial charters projected imagined borders far away from the settled coastlines. Borders, as such, were less of a concern in this earliest phase of colonization. Early maps, for instance, were often borderless. As colonies expanded, however, and came into contact with neighboring polities, often other British colonies, they began to solidify intercolonial borders. Colonies also had borders with Native American groups and with their imperial rivals that they negotiated or fought to secure, which is when frontiers and borders often overlapped.
Fixing these political boundaries between rival colonies required a distinctive type of governing. Here, colonial officials had to operate within a larger imperial framework that had its own laws and precedents for establishing jurisdiction. While colonial officials caught in the midst of a border dispute were always cognizant of the larger superstructure to which they belonged, as we shall see, during border wars they regularly ignored these laws in practice. The most distinctive part of these conflicts was the means to secure victory. While martial strength often played a role in the course of the conflict, what mattered more for victory was the ability for one of the competing colonies to appeal to the needs of local colonists and secure a loyal following that would bolster the victorious colony’s governing authority. In this process of border creation, regular colonists got to pick the government they preferred and, by doing so, shape the contours of the empire through the terms of their allegiance. In the end, establishing borders, a political designation meant to create stability in the empire, fostered animosities as warring colonies adopted tactics that divided colonists, bred uncertainty, and created political disorder.14
When colonial border wars increased in the greater Pennsylvania region during the 1770s, the politics of frontiers, something that had been absent from previous intercolonial clashes, fused with colonial competition over borders, allowing frontier inhabitants to use their power of choice to remake the colonial and imperial governments to which they belonged. It was, as one of the people who lived at the time would later remember, “a strange state of society” in which colonists rejected the Pennsylvania model of security through peace and used colonial competition to empower the vision of a more militarized government that would come to define the future of governing American frontiers.
It is no mistake, then, that Thomas Jefferson was thinking about Indian relations on the new nation’s frontiers as he penned the Declaration of Independence or that John Dickinson dedicated the longest section of the Articles of Confederation to establishing peaceful borders between the newly independent states. These two issues were a central part of the crisis of empire and among the reasons for revolution. Putting colonial competition alongside the development of “frontiers” creates a more complete—though still imperfect—picture of politics in the colonies at the very moment the British Empire in North America experienced a precipitous fall.
The politics of frontiers and border creation are the intertwined issues that form the core of this book. The story begins with Pennsylvania’s founding and follows the colony’s political expansion, tracing the colony’s early successes in managing frontiers and border conflicts to its later catastrophic failures in both areas. Combined, the events show that the ultimate cause of Pennsylvania’s collapse during the 1760s and 1770s was its inability to govern frontiers, a problem that the colony avoided during its first decades. The unstable political borders in the 1770s only exacerbated the underlying problem frontiers posed to governing Pennsylvania and the British Empire more generally. The story ends with the American Revolution, when self-described “frontier people” seized political power and remade government to do the one thing the colonial government could
