Americans have customarily defined the frontier as the limit of European-American agricultural settlement. This definition ignores the fact that many Native Americans farmed and lived in towns. More recently, historians have viewed frontiers less as a boundary and more as a zone of communication between cultures—between European Americans and Native Americans as well as between Anglo-Americans and colonists from other European powers. In particular, scholars have emphasized the role of the individuals who lived along and traveled through the frontier as cultural intermediaries. Whatever definition one uses, the period between 1761 and 1812 witnessed a pushing back of the frontier from east of the Appalachians to just beyond the Mississippi River.
Traditional ideas of the frontier were in large part molded by the Enlightenment thought of the revolutionary generation whose Republican beliefs held that all societies could be placed on a spectrum from primitive to advanced. A primitive society was one that depended on hunting and gathering. Many European Americans falsely assumed that Native Americans were at this level of development. Conservatives also believed that even the European Americans who moved to the frontier adopted the Indian mode of living and became hunters and gatherers as well. As society moved toward civilization, it became more dependent upon agriculture. With new layers of complexity added to society, commerce became more important, cities developed, and industrial production expanded. The revolutionary generation, however, believed that there were cycles in history: The more advanced stages of civilization were symptoms of decay, leading to the destruction of the society and the beginning of the cycle all over again. From this perspective, the expansion of the frontier was crucial. New areas of settlement promised to sustain the United States as an agricultural nation and put off the end of European-American society.
Concerns with the frontier played a role in the origins of the American Revolution. After victory in the French and Indian War (1754-63), colonial Americans hoped that new lands west of the Appalachians would be open to settlement. However, in an effort to protect its Native American subjects and to reduce military expenditures, the British government issued the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting settlement west of the Appalachians. The Quebec Act of 1774 granted this territory to Canada and also sought to limit colonial American settlement in the West. This barrier to frontier expansion became an important colonial grievance. At the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-83), the Treaty of Paris (1783) provided a generous boundary for the United States, stretching to the Mississippi River. During the 1770s, Daniel Boone and a few other European Americans had begun to cross the mountains. Following the war, thousands of European Americans streamed across the Appalachians to settle the new frontier. Efforts of the United States government to guide and limit the settlement to below the Ohio River proved fruitless, leading to a series of wars with Native
Americans that culminated in the Battle of Tippecanoe (November 7, 1811) and Andrew Jackson’s campaign against the Creek in the War of 1812 (1812-15).
Popular images of the frontier reflect only some of the reality. Men did wear coonskin caps, and the first dwellings erected were often lean-tos or crude log cabins. But as soon as anyone on the frontier could afford to, they bought clothing in stores and improved their houses. Perhaps equally important in the mythology was the idea that every frontiersman wanted his own piece of land to farm and raise a family in some agrarian paradise. Few on the frontier had such limited ambitions. Settlers south of the Ohio often hoped someday to own a plantation with slaves; settlers farther north may have simply wanted to produce a cash crop for the market. Speculation was rampant on the frontier. Those with the grandest dreams sought to engross thousands of acres. More humble men merely wanted to improve the land to sell it for a higher price. Within such an aggressively capitalistic atmosphere more fortunes were lost than won. The frontier, in other words, was less rough and tumble and more boom and bust.
His canal designs employed various mechanical devices, such as wheels, inclined planes, and aqueducts that Fulton illustrated well, using his artistic talents. In 1796 he published a book on canal design and sent letters to President George Washington and Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin advocating canal projects in the United States. Although none of these projects came to fruition, a canal system later constructed in Pennsylvania followed Fulton’s basic design.
In 1797 Fulton traveled to France, where he quickly established connections to the French government. By the end of 1797 he had refocused his energies on naval warfare and proposed a plan for a cigar-shaped submarine that could be used to plant bombs in the water to destroy enemy ships. Between 1797 and 1801, Fulton developed a submarine called the Nautilus, and he experimented with it along the French coast of the English Channel and the Seine River. Though the Nautilus proved successful, Fulton declined to present it formally to Napoleon Bonaparte and dismantled it before French naval
Further reading: Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999); Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1995).
Fulton, Robert (1765-1815) inventor, developer of the steamboat
Robert Fulton was an inventor who designed canals, submarines, mines, and the first commercially successful steamboat to travel on American waterways. Fulton was born in 1765 to a Scots-Irish family in southeastern Pennsylvania. He grew up in the town of Lancaster in a family of modest wealth. As a young man, Fulton became a portrait painter to a number of wealthy Pennsylvania families in the 1780s. In 1787 he traveled to England to advance his artistic career and did not return to the United States for 20 years. In England, Fulton shifted the direction of his career from portrait painting to canal engineering. With the financial backing of a few landholders and industrialists, he developed sophisticated plans for canals.
Robert Fulton. Wood engraving (Library of Congress)
Engineers could investigate and copy the design. Fulton steadfastly considered himself a private entrepreneur with control of his creations independent of the will of the French regime under Napoleon. Between 1800 and 1802, Fulton also developed plans for submerged bombs, which he called torpedoes that would either be released by submarines or be anchored on the seafloor. He also initially drew up plans for a steamboat that he presented to Napoleon, although these plans were not developed at this time. In 1804 English agents lured Fulton to England to work for the Royal Navy. In two years of service, Fulton designed and launched two torpedo attacks on French ships—and successfully tested a larger mine—before deciding to return to the United States.
In the United States, the newly famous Fulton resumed his work on torpedoes for the U. S. Navy. Also, Fulton turned to his steamboat project in partnership with New Yorker Robert R. Livingston. With Livingston’s financial support, Fulton completed his steamboat, which is commonly known as the Clermont (officially it was named the North River Steam Boat). It caused a national sensation with a trip up the Hudson River in 1807. By 1809 Livingston and Fulton had created another steamboat and established a commercial steamboat line with an exclusive right to operate on New York waters.
During the War of 1812 (1812-15), Fulton contracted with the Captain Stephen Decatur and the U. S. Navy to create the first steam warship; unfortunately, it was not completed until mid-1815. He also continued testing mines and more sophisticated torpedo boats, and many were employed in various naval engagements. During the war, Fulton also became embroiled in legal action, successfully defending his company’s patent and monopoly rights to operate steamboats in New York. Fulton died unexpectedly in February 1815.
See also science.
Further reading: Cynthia Owen Phillip, Robert Fulton: A Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1985).
World History
