From 'Peaceable Kingdom' to 'Wild West': Violence and Crime on the Early American Frontier.

Historians from Frederick Jackson Turner, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, have recognised the role of the frontier in shaping a distinctive American society, different both from its European forebears and from other societies in North America. Central to all historians' definitions of frontier society is the propensity of frontier residents to resort to violence. Yet while historians have universally acknowledged the frequency of frontier violence they have made little attempt to understand the causes or nature of this violence. Indeed, underlying many frontier studies is the implicit assumption that frontier societies were, by their very nature, violent. However, recent work, on early Pennsylvania in particular, has revealed that the American frontier did not have to be violent but could foster a harmonious relationship both between the settlers themselves and between settlers and Native Americans.

Most of the recent work on the early American frontier has focused on particular local, or at the most regional, studies and there has been little broad comparative work. The few historians who have made broader studies of the frontier have rooted their explanations of violence largely in the ethnicity of frontier settlers. In particular, historians have explained the ubiquity of frontier violence by the presence of Scottish and Ulster Scots settlers on the frontier. They have assumed that such settlers brought traditions of violence with them across the Atlantic, although such traditions of endemic violence are all but impossible to locate in the British Isles.

This project will analyse why violence and disorder became so prevalent in certain parts of the frontier but not in others, and will define the extent, nature and causes of frontier violence. An overarching premise of this project is that the spread of violence and disorder on the frontier was not determined solely by the intrinsic nature of a frontier society, but rather by a combination of social and cultural forces which were unique to each region. Indeed frontier society was markedly different in each region, and each region had different patterns of violence and crime. The study will also examine the results of that violence, and in particular the extent to which violence generated individualism or fostered community cohesion.

The project will examine study four separate 'frontiers': early south-eastern Pennsylvania in the first half of the eighteenth century; western North Carolina from ca. 1740-1800; western Pennsylvania from ca. 1760-1810 and Upper Canada from ca. 1770-1820. By studying four regions where there were different patterns of frontier violence, it will be possible to study the influence of forces which generated violence such as the nature of the settlers' relationship with Native Americans, the effectiveness of judicial and political authority, the impact of absentee land-ownership, the extent of gun-ownership, and economic competition for land and trade. The central element of this project is a comparative study between the frontier of early Canada and that of the United States. A further comparative element will be added by studying several related regions of the United States' frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A comparative study of the causes and nature of violence on the frontier will enhance our understanding of how, when and why violence occurred all along the North American frontier, and thus deepen our understanding of the role and purposes of violence in early American society. By providing a new perspective on the causes and results of violence and by explaining how violence operated on the frontier, this project will provide new ways of approaching and understanding some of the central issues of early American history such as Indian-white relations, warfare, and the acquisition of land, and , perhaps most importanly, the role of the frontier in shaping American identity.