Progressive Historians Essay

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One must decide the meaning of “progressive historiography.” It can mean

either the history written by “progressive historians,” or it can mean

history written by historians of the Progressive era of American history and

shortly after. The focus that was chosen for this paper is more in keeping with

the latter interpretation, if for no other reason than it provides a useful

compare-and-contrast “control” literature. The caveat is this: the focus of

this report is on the predominant question of the historiographical period: was

the war a revolution or a war for independence? One could choose many other

questions to argue, questions that historians have for years disputed about the

revolution, but there are a number of reasons why this report was chosen for

this particular assignment; the two best follow. First, it is an old and

time-honored question that professors and instructors have posed to their

students for years; of pre-Civil War historiographical questions, it is perhaps

second only in fashion during the last twenty to twenty-five years to the

Jefferson-Hemmings paternity controversy. Second, the revolution-or-independence

question is one of those which must be answered through interpretation. A case

cannot be made that is so utterly conclusive as to exclude all others; it is

that very fact that makes history at once so frustrating and so fascinating.

What better way could there be to look at the writings of a specific school of

historians? Therefore, in the pursuit of “personal truth,” we must

proceed... Perhaps the most famous of all progressive historians is Frederick

Jackson Turner. His most famous argument is not devoted strictly to the American

Revolution, but instead to the effects of the American frontier. In a sentence,

his argument is that the frontier was the chief determinant in American history.

This is not to say that Turner did not write about the war; he did, in his

seminal work, “The Frontier in American History,” there are discussions of

the frontier’s effect on the coming of the revolution. It is worth noting,

before exploring Turner’s arguments, that the frontier in this period was only

about one hundred miles from the Atlantic coast. Of course, as the period under

scrutiny approaches the war chronologically, the frontier moves away from the

ocean. But it is important to remember that Turner defines the Jamestown of

Captain John Smith in 1607 as the frontier in its initial stage. So, in this

context, it makes sense to the almost-twenty-first-century reader when Turner

refers to the frontier as defined by the Proclamation of 1763 as the “Old

West.” Turner gives an idea of his world-view near the end of the book: The

transformations through which the United States is passing in our own day are so

profound, so far-reaching, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are

witnessing the birth of a new nation in America. The revolution in social and

economic structure of this country during the past two decades is comparable to

what occurred when independence was declared and the constitution was formed, or

to the changes wrought by the era which began half a century ago, the era of

Civil War and Reconstruction (Turner 1920, 311). This point bears further

examination in the context of all the historians being compared in this paper,

but in a later section. It is more important at this point to continue with the

discussion of Turner’s examination of the war as it relates to his frontier

thesis. Briefly, Turner argues five points specific to the war in his overall

treatment of the frontier. First, a fighting frontier had been established from

Georgia to New England as a result of the colonial wars with the French. Second,

a primitively agricultural and democratically self-sufficient society had been

established on the frontier that was profoundly and fundamentally different from

the society from which the frontiersmen’s progenitors had sprung; it is of

course because those progenitors were different from their fellows that they

came across the ocean in the first place. Third, the frontier developed home

markets for the growing—--though still small—--colonial industrial base,

lessening the importance of the triangular trade. Fourth, non-English settlers

had caused an unintended and at first informal breach with the mother country

that later fueled separatist sentiment; it is no great thing in the thick of

rebellion to forget that the war was at first a war for the rights of Englishmen

when one is not an Englishman in the first place. Fifth, the frontier by its

very nature reflected a contest between the privileged and the non-privileged;

Turner maintains that this dichotomy was more in evidence outside New England

and was more of a democratic revolution outside that region than inside (Turner

1920, 106-111). Of course, one is tempted to minimize, or even belittle this

last observation by pointing out that the New Englanders provided the bulk of

the troops for the rebel army... In any case, Turner’s arguments foreshadow

those of another historian, J. Franklin Jameson. Both argue a geographical or

quasi-geographical determinism. Both argue that the war was a revolution that

resulted in greater democracy, though their definitions of democracy are rather

broad. Before turning to Jameson, however, another work by Turner should be

mentioned, entitled “The Significance of Sections in American History,”

which was published in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. This book is

not exclusively about the American Revolution. Instead, it discusses several

important factors in American history from a demographic perspective. Turner

echoes his own frontier thesis in this work, citing instances in the West that

shaped the character of the Revolution. The behavior of the earliest pioneers

was important in understanding the later evolution of the country, he argued,

and focused on the North Carolina frontiersmen. He concluded that the

Association desired “not to be arded as a lawless mob,” and their petition

for annexation to North Carolina led to a regularization of the political status

of the frontier districts (Turner 1932, 97). This pattern would be repeated

again and again in the decades after the war, but Turner’s point is that the

frontier districts were just as important to the political and social nature of

the struggle as were the established eastern districts and towns which have

received so much more “press” in the literature. Another factor of

consequence in Turner’s view was early sectionalism (indeed, that is the focus

of this particular book, much more so than the American war for independence).

“The West,” which in the middle nineteenth century meant such lands as Iowa

and Indiana, instead meant in pre-Revolutionary years the western regions of the

existing colonies. Turner specifically discussed the western regions of

Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. He suggested that the geography of the

region--rocky and mountainous, in distinct contrast to the alluvial plains of

the tidewater region--made for an order much more like New England society than

the planter-led society of Virginia and the rest of the South. He contended that

the frontier communities were more democratic. An informed reader can today

easily infer that Turner was writing not just of the revolution, but of the

beginnings of the sectional competition that culminated in the American Civil

War (Turner 1932, 293). But it is the geographical determinism that Turner

advances that is of the most interest to this paper; one sees the same sort of

argument again and again while reading the works of Turner and his fellows in

the progressive school. J. Franklin Jameson wrote a landmark work in 1926. More

accurately, it was a collection of four lectures that were subsequently

collected into a hundred-page book. His basic premise was that the war was a

social revolution. He made four main arguments (coincidental with the four

lectures), which follow. First, Jameson argued that the status of persons was

changed. He maintained that slavery was ended in a significant region by the

war, and that abolitionism became fashionable and real as a political force. In

order to contest this conclusion, it is a simple thing to counter-argue that

since Massachusetts had but five slaves in 1776, it seems that slavery was

definitely on its way out before the war even began in earnest. Moreover, it

would be obvious to point out that abolitionism was certainly not new to the

Northern States before and during the war. In short, the arguments regarding the

status of people and how that status changed as a result of the war really do

not hold up under scrutiny. Second, Jameson argued that the nature of the land

promoted change in the people. He claimed that the geography of New England made

for revolutionary thought among small holders and freemen that was not so

evident among those in the tidewater south. But the colonists were “different

sorts” to begin with; the Pilgrims and Puritans of the North were outcasts

before they came across the Atlantic. The middle-staters of Pennsylvania--the

Quakers--and especially Maryland--Catholics, Huguenots, and Presbyterians--were

already in search of a place where they could be different and be at least

quasi-independent. To lay the responsibility for the revolution on mountains and

streams, thereby ignoring the nature of the people before they arrived, is a bit

much to swallow. Did the land change the colonists, or were the human changes to

the land merely a reflection of the ideas the colonists had with them already,

and of the institutional-cultural heritage of these people? At the very least,

it is a chicken-and-egg question, but it seems that the latter argument is the

accurate one. In this same vein, Jameson cites the end of primogeniture as a

social-revolutionary aspect of the war. To illustrate the inaccuracy of this

interpretation, one need only mention that primogeniture was abolished in

Britain over time without a war at all. It seems that the trend away from

primogeniture was already afoot in the British world (of which the colonists

were a part, and of which even in 1776 most wished to remain). War or no war,

primogeniture would almost certainly have receded, as it did. In addition,

Jameson claims that the frontier unleashed a revolution. His view is that the

frontier itself was in some way responsible for revolutionary attitudes and

thoughts, as if the land itself changed the way that the residents thought. For

the sake of brevity, let us say only that Turner’s frontier thesis is a much

more convincing picture of American history than is Jameson’s. In short,

Turner argues that the frontier throughout American history has attracted and

promoted certain types of people and certain types of behavior. Jameson implies

that the frontier made revolutionaries, and that when the war was over, they

stopped being revolutionary. Turner makes the point from the opposite pole: the

frontier, by its very nature, provided an environment where people who would

otherwise have been misfits and malcontents could flourish and achieve a modicum

of what would then certainly have been termed “respectability.” Jameson’s

argument virtually anthropomorphizes the frontier, while Turner casts the region

in a more proper role: that of a passive agent. Third, Jameson discusses

business and industry. He discusses how the war caused the Agricultural

Revolution to be visited upon the Americas. In Europe, where land was at a

premium, peasants had had to adopt new methods in order to survive their growing

population. By contrast, in the colonies, land was cheap and plentiful, so new

methods were not required. Nonetheless, it seems safe to argue that the methods

adopted in the colonies would have been adopted eventually, war or no war, when

the population density made it sensible to do so. Along similar lines, Jameson

suggests that the war caused a revolutionary growth and change in war and

commercial industries: paper, salt, powder, cannons, and muskets all had to be

manufactured to fight the war. Of course, after 1918, when the industrial nature

of warfare had become painfully evident. It is easy to see how he made this

conclusion. But it is also easy to see, even with the benefit of the same

hindsight that Jameson could have used, that the growth of industry and commerce

would almost certainly have occurred anyway, war or no war. Napoleonic France

was not converted into an industrial power, despite nearly twenty-five years of

virtually non-stop warfare that was of a far greater magnitude than was the

“American Revolution.” It is far more sensible to argue that the industry

and commerce of the Americas would have developed as a result of trade with

Europe, with or without a war. Lastly, many participants argued at the time that

the colonies were economically weakened because of the war for a significant

period. How is it that Jameson concluded the exact opposite one hundred fifty

years later? Fourth, Jameson argued that thought and feeling changed. At first,

this claim seems the most plausible. He suggested that the war was a precursor

to the European revolutionary fervor of the 1830s; this perhaps has some

validity, but the fervor of the 1830s was a more

peasants-against-the-aristocracy sort of thing than it was a

taxation-without-representation sort of thing. Another difference was

nationalism, a decidedly made-in-France phenomenon. Greeks, for example, rose up

against the Ottoman Turks in 1830 in order to establish a Greek state. This was

not the nature of the American war, for no foreign power of different ethnicity

held sway in the colonies; certainly no Germans rose up in Pennsylvania in order

to establish a German-style state out of the old British colony. Indeed, Germans

tended toward loyalist sensibilities. Jameson argued that the war had the effect

of creating more colleges and of diffusing religious faith. This certainly is a

description of cultural contact with Europe more than it is a description of a

result of a war. These very things took place in Europe before and after the

American war; sometimes these phenomena were accompanied by violence and armed

struggle, and sometimes not. The Americas were already religiously diverse, and

it probably comes as no surprise that the conclusion to this paper is that the

growth of colleges was accompanied by, and was a result of, a substantial growth

in the population. This rather leaves the war out of the picture; for wars

seldom create things, but instead tend to destroy or impede them. It should be

pointed out that Jameson makes no political arguments outside of suffrage. (One

generally thinks of dramatic political changes as being a result of a

“revolution.”) He discusses political institutions not at all. He is only

concerned with who had the vote. However, even before the war, the colonies had

wider suffrage than the European countries from which the people and their

forebears came; how is this a revolutionary outcome? Were these people not

fighting to preserve that which they already had against the growing influence

of the House of Commons, which threatened to take their self-determination away?

Slavery was already receding in the colonies; it was evolving away--in Vermont

in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784; if the

revolution was the cause, why then did abolition, albeit gradual, continue its

march in New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804? The American variety of

slavery was already “less bad” than in many, if not most, other countries,

regardless of what twentieth-century movie and television productions might have

you believe. Was the country not already progressive? Another writer of note who

is labeled as a progressive historian is Carl Becker. He was a student of

Frederick Jackson Turner and submitted as his doctoral dissertation--it was

called a thesis at that time--a work entitled “The History of Political

Parties in the Province of New York.” In it, Becker writes that the political

parties in what became the state of New York were embroiled in a tremendous

rivalry. The members of the “conservative” wing wanted only to go so far as

to assert their rights as Englishmen, while the radical element desired

independence. Becker argues for a compromise interpretation in his conclusion,

stating that “although the conservatives were successful in securing a

government measurably centralized and measurably aristocratic, we know that

there was considerable pressure for a more democratic form” (Becker 1909,

276). In short, Becker describes the desire for a significantly different form

of government than that which England had, and existed in the colony before the

insurrection. In the end, of course, the form was essentially the same; that is,

a bicameral legislature was placed in the stead of Parliament, the President

(who likely could have been King George I of America) was substituted for the

King of England, and a judicial branch was established to play the role of the

British courts. It is significant to mention that the second provincial congress

of New York opposed independence from Great Britain at least as late as May 14,

1775 (Becker 1909, 252). It is the extent of suffrage that gives a measure of

truth to the progressive argument as symbolized by Becker’s work. The growth

of political groups in New York presaged the formation of formal parties in the

colonies as a whole, foreshadowed the further entrenchment of those same parties

after the Constitution was ratified, and paralleled the same developmental path

in Great Britain. The same congress mentioned above voted to extend the

franchise to freeholders and freemen with holdings equivalent to forty pounds

(Becker 1909, 252). The Committee of fifty-one was essentially dissolved as the

Mechanics and the fifty-one merged in a new system that eliminated wards and

substituted in its place a system of election by citizens at large (Becker 1909,

166). This presaged a similar reform in England after the war with Napoleon, the

Reform Bill of 1832. One is tempted to wonder if that reform in England was

delayed by the war; certainly one could argue that the reform in New York was

prompted by the war, but one can also be left with a sense that the change was

on the verge of taking place anyway, war or no war. Nonetheless, Becker is

consistent with other progressive historians when he argues the case of extended

suffrage as a result of the conflict with Great Britain. Becker is also in step

with his progressive counterparts when he argues his “road to revolution”

thesis from the point of view of merchants. He spends an entire chapter

discussing in detail the relative efficacy of the non-importation measures

instituted by the colonies (the word “boycott” had of course not yet been

coined in the 1770s, and historians of the early 1900s were apparently

disinclined to use it). In short, he argues that the non-intercourse measures (a

synonym for non-importation) were essentially ineffective. To be sure, there

were fluctuations, but the image of the non-importation measures must be one of

reducing the flow of goods, not one of shutting the flow off and turning it on

when the colonists...

Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
United States. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. Beard, Charles A. and Mary.
Basic History of the United States. New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Company,
1944. Becker, Carl. Beginnings of the American People. New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1922. Becker, Carl. The History of Political Parties in the Province of
New York, 1760-1776. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1909. Billias,
George Athan, ed. The American Revolution: How Revolutionary Was It? New York:
Holt Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1990. Originally published in 1965. Used for
background reading only. Fiske, John. The American Revolution, vol. II. New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1891. Hart, Albert Bushnell. Formation of the Union,
1750-1829. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1894. Hofstadter, Richard.
The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1968. Jameson, J. Franklin. The American Revolution Considered as a
Social Movement. Princeton University: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Originally published in 1926. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Sr. The Colonial Merchants
and the American Revolution. New York: Facsimile Library, Inc., 1939. Originally
published in 1918. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History.
New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962. Originally published in 1920. You should cite this paper as follows:

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