The Significance of the Frontier in American History

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was a prominent American statesperson who served as vice president, secretary of state, and senator during his political career.

Turner cites a speech by Calhoun from 1817 in his essay to illustrate the rapid pace of expansion and population growth in the early 19th-century United States. Calhoun said, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” (2) This growth was fueled by western migration, which Turner argues shaped American democracy and culture. Calhoun feared the disruptive impacts of unchecked Western growth, which threatened the Eastern-centric balance of power. He was also motivated by his own Southern planter interests in resisting internal improvements that would integrate the frontier. Calhoun’s support for states’ rights aimed to shield slavery and elite planters like himself from the forces unfettered western expansion could unleash.

Turner uses Calhoun as an exemplar for the reactionary force of the American establishment and vested interest, arguing that Calhoun’s efforts to assert state sovereignty and Eastern interests were in opposition to the democratic nationalizing tendencies of the frontier that Turner champions.

Turner’s essay focuses on the frontier as central to American identity, democracy, and progress from a white American perspective, marginalizing Indigenous people and perpetuating narratives of Manifest Destiny. The lands Turner defines as the frontier were never uninhabited. They had been home to Indigenous peoples for millennia before white settlers arrived. Yet Turner’s essay overlooks this, reflecting the prevailing dehumanizing narrative at the time that presented the presence of Indigenous communities as equal to a lack of population. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” ignores the violence, displacement, and genocide that enabled white settlers to dominate the frontier through force.

As white expansion pushed the frontier steadily westward, hundreds of Indigenous tribes were subject to broken treaties, forced removals, military conquest, epidemics, massacres, cultural erasure, and more. Turner’s essay disregards this devastating toll of settler colonialism. His frontier narrative focuses on the agency, values, and identity of white Americans shaped by frontier life rather than the crimes committed against Indigenous peoples. Turner depicts Indigenous peoples as obstacles blocking American expansion rather than sophisticated communities with inherent and pre-existing rights to the land. His language and argument set up a racist dichotomy between “civilizing” settlers and the “savage” lands and people beyond the frontier.