Items related to Race to the Frontier: "White Flight” and Western...
Race relations were an important driving force in the move to settle the West, as the political records and personal accounts show. Race to the Frontier provides an analysis of this little-discussed but essential facet of American history.
Why did so many thousands of settlers pull up stakes and undertake the arduous journey to the frontier in 18th and 19th-century America?' While the desire for a more prosperous future figured prominently in their decisions, so did another, largely overlooked factor -- the presence of slavery and the growing number of blacks, both free and slave, in the eastern half of the United States. Poor white farmers, particularly those in the Upper South, found themselves displaced by the spreading of the plantation system. In order to survive economically they were chronically forced to move further inland. As they did so, they brought with them a deep animosity toward the enslaved blacks whom they blamed for this uprooting.
Wherever these "plain folk" farmers subsequently settled -- in Kentucky, the free states north of the Ohio River, Missouri, and the outpost of Oregon, they sought to erect legal barriers to prevent slavery from taking hold as well as to deter the migration of free blacks who would otherwise compete for jobs and endanger white society. The pushing back of the frontier can be seen as an attempt to escape the complexities of a biracial nation and preserve white homogeneity by creating sanctuaries in these Western lands. The political struggle to establish more free states west of the Mississippi also reflects this goal: white nominally opposed to slavery, many "free staters" were most concerned about keeping all blacks at bay.
Race to the Frontier is the first book to trace the impact of this racial hostility throughout the settlement of the West, from the days of colonial Virginia up to the Civil War. It clearly demonstrates how closely racial prejudice, economic growth, and geographical expansion have been entwined in American history.
Why did so many thousands of settlers pull up stakes and undertake the arduous journey to the frontier in 18th and 19th-century America?' While the desire for a more prosperous future figured prominently in their decisions, so did another, largely overlooked factor -- the presence of slavery and the growing number of blacks, both free and slave, in the eastern half of the United States. Poor white farmers, particularly those in the Upper South, found themselves displaced by the spreading of the plantation system. In order to survive economically they were chronically forced to move further inland. As they did so, they brought with them a deep animosity toward the enslaved blacks whom they blamed for this uprooting.
Wherever these "plain folk" farmers subsequently settled -- in Kentucky, the free states north of the Ohio River, Missouri, and the outpost of Oregon, they sought to erect legal barriers to prevent slavery from taking hold as well as to deter the migration of free blacks who would otherwise compete for jobs and endanger white society. The pushing back of the frontier can be seen as an attempt to escape the complexities of a biracial nation and preserve white homogeneity by creating sanctuaries in these Western lands. The political struggle to establish more free states west of the Mississippi also reflects this goal: white nominally opposed to slavery, many "free staters" were most concerned about keeping all blacks at bay.
Race to the Frontier is the first book to trace the impact of this racial hostility throughout the settlement of the West, from the days of colonial Virginia up to the Civil War. It clearly demonstrates how closely racial prejudice, economic growth, and geographical expansion have been entwined in American history.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
John H. V. Dippel is author of World War II -- Two Against Hitler, and Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire. In addition, his articles on political affairs have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New Leader.
A graduate of Princeton University, John Dippel also holds advanced degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and Columbia University. He lives with his family in a village in New York s Hudson Valley.
Review:
A graduate of Princeton University, John Dippel also holds advanced degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and Columbia University. He lives with his family in a village in New York s Hudson Valley.
One of the primary factors driving westward expansion in the United States, according to this history, was the displacement of poor farmers by the expanding slave plantation system and racial antipathy towards black slaves and freemen alike. Beginning with the colonial era in Virginia and ending with the settlement of Oregon just before the Civil War, the author describes this process and assesses its lasting influence on race relations in the United States and the political landscape of the West. --Booknews
One associates "white flight" with suburban expansion and central city decay after World War II. John Dippel extends the term spatially and temporally to create an explanatory framework for the middle stream of east-to-west migration in American history. Opportunity pulled poor and middling white farmers westward, to be sure, but slavery and the problematic presence of free blacks pushed them as well.
In other words, westward movement was not so much an expansion as a "withdrawal from the complexities of a biracial world." It was not an advance, but rather "a retreat in both time and space" (p. 5). Slavery and black people followed each re-treat; in turn, whites sought refuge farther west. The central thesis of the book is found on page 7: "Settlement of the West turned out to be not an antidote to the problem of race, but a battleground for its resolution."recreated on the frontier, but not quite in the way Frederick Jackson Turner theorized. . . . --The State Historical Society of Missouri
John V. H. Dippel provocatively deploys the modern decampment of whites to the suburbs as an organizing metaphor for his argument that the desire to distance themselves from African Americans motivated successive waves of white "plain folk" to relocate ever farther westward. At the argument s core is a demographic genealogy of Free Soil ideology, the northern antebellum vision of the Mid-west and trans-Mississippi territories as the dominion of free white farmers, whose material opportunities would be maximized and labor ennobled by the absence of slavery. Many Free Soilers were unapologetically racist, ascribing the degradations of slavery as inherent characteristics of all African Americans. Although Dippel s emphasis on the anti-black element of frontier development is buttressed by existing scholarship, his sweeping synthesis relies on too many partial inferences to be fully persuasive, let alone to reconfigure our understanding of either westward expansion or of American racial ideology.
Dippel identifies the seeds of Free Soil prejudice in seventeenth-century Virginia and follows white nonslaveholding southerners who planted those seeds in frontier zones from the Virginia Piedmont all the way to Oregon and California. Rather than analyze race as a historically contingent cultural construct, he treats it as an essentially ingrained hatred from the time of Nathaniel Bacon s insurgency to Abraham Lincoln s ascendancy. In this formulation, white migrants despised blacks and had no desire to share either the unregulated freedom of frontier zones or the fruits of the subsequent rural economy.
Dippel s case for racist continuity relies on census data which indicates impressive numbers of white Virginians, Kentuckians, and their descendants residing in the southern tier of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), as well as in Missouri and subsequent western territories. He observes that more Kentuckians emigrated to free states than to slave states and indicates that one-third of Oregonians were of southern origins, including almost half of the delegates to the territory s 1857 constitutional convention. Dippel s statistical analysis is especially useful when he is able to link racist legislation and state constitutional provisions to politicians from particular districts where southerners and former southerners settled most heavily. But even these numbers suggest what white plain folk thought about race, without confirming that the desire to be free of exposure to black people was, in and of itself, a principle motivation for moving. Moreover, as Dippel s own account indicates, western migrants from the North to places as far away as Oregon advocated for the same sorts of racially exclusive policies as their southern-descended counterparts.
Dippel s treatment of Free Soil ideology as a persistent southern folk-way with important political manifestations can be quite informative. The final chapter of the book features the story of Tennessee-born, Missouri-raised Peter H. Burnett as an advocate of black exclusion in both the Oregon and California territories. Several hundred miles away from established slave states and in the virtual absence of African Americans, anti-black racism constituted an important force in defining the values of the frontier. Earlier in the book, Dippel provides a brief, effective sketch of Jonathan Jennings s party as it forestalled the spread of slavery to Indiana while also seeking to minimize the black presence in the Hoosier state by refusing to extend the franchise to free blacks. --Indiana Magazine of History, Volume 104, No 2. June 2008.
Race relations undoubtedly shaped the development of the United States. Much of the nation's early history hinges on the American construction of racial identity. Constitutional recognition of human chattel reinforced the subordination and dehumanization of people of African descent during the founding of the New Republic. "King Cotton" further solidified American racial attitudes during the 19th century. Whites Generally occupied a superior station in life relative to blacks by sheer virtue of skin color by the start of the American Civil War. Ironically, sectional and philosophical divisions among some white Americans led to a reduction in the divisions between blacks and whites. Or did they? Race to the Frontier provides readers with an innovative approach to understanding how race and racism shaped life along the western frontier following the Civil War.
John V. H. Dippel's alternative view of westward expansion suggests that northern and midwestern whites who refused to accept blacks as equals migrated westward mainly to avoid effects of black inmigration. According to Dippel, "racial factors were inextricably bound up with the economic well being of these white pioneers ... and, therefore, did contribute significantly to their decisions to migrate and influence the social and political outlook that took hold on the frontier" (p. 5). Dippel supports his conclusion by tracing the nation's race problem from the tidewater region of the Virginia Colony to the Pacific territories. . . . . .
When viewed from this perspective, it is highly plausible that some whites from this era actually fled northern and Midwestern states when confronted with the idea of being surrounded and overrun by a wretched race of subordinates. Dippel's eloquent writing is both entertaining and informative. Impeccable research and historical analysis thoroughly support his conclusion that the consistent pattern of white dispersal across the United States reveals an effort to achieve ... a cohesive, homogeneous, and exclusive society. From colonial days onward, this impulse to flee from a far more complicated racial reality has been an integral, if largely unacknowledged, aspect of the American dream (p. 306).
He makes excellent use of memoirs, newspapers, court records, legislative debates, and special collections. As a bonus, he puts white flight westward in perspective by drawing heavily upon a detailed synthesis of early American history prior to 1877. Undoubtedly, one will fully enjoy reading this book, if one is remotely interested in early American race relations, politics, geographic expansion, slavery, migration, and immigration.
Ervin James III, Texas A&M University College Station, Texas for Pacific Northwest Quarterly
In a recent US political campaign, one candidate's mantra reiterated, "It's about the economy." Paraphrasing that, the westward movement across the US was "about the land." Whether quoting a Native American leader or an agricultural laborer seeking economic opportunity, the issue was land. By contrast, Dippel's intriguing and simultaneously elusive thesis argues a westward expansion driven by racial hatred. Read carefully, the book hauntingly questions the pervasive national US racism, but like many chimerical pursuits, it offers no satisfactory answer.... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty. --CHOICE Magazine Jan 2007
One associates "white flight" with suburban expansion and central city decay after World War II. John Dippel extends the term spatially and temporally to create an explanatory framework for the middle stream of east-to-west migration in American history. Opportunity pulled poor and middling white farmers westward, to be sure, but slavery and the problematic presence of free blacks pushed them as well.
In other words, westward movement was not so much an expansion as a "withdrawal from the complexities of a biracial world." It was not an advance, but rather "a retreat in both time and space" (p. 5). Slavery and black people followed each re-treat; in turn, whites sought refuge farther west. The central thesis of the book is found on page 7: "Settlement of the West turned out to be not an antidote to the problem of race, but a battleground for its resolution."recreated on the frontier, but not quite in the way Frederick Jackson Turner theorized. . . . --The State Historical Society of Missouri
John V. H. Dippel provocatively deploys the modern decampment of whites to the suburbs as an organizing metaphor for his argument that the desire to distance themselves from African Americans motivated successive waves of white "plain folk" to relocate ever farther westward. At the argument s core is a demographic genealogy of Free Soil ideology, the northern antebellum vision of the Mid-west and trans-Mississippi territories as the dominion of free white farmers, whose material opportunities would be maximized and labor ennobled by the absence of slavery. Many Free Soilers were unapologetically racist, ascribing the degradations of slavery as inherent characteristics of all African Americans. Although Dippel s emphasis on the anti-black element of frontier development is buttressed by existing scholarship, his sweeping synthesis relies on too many partial inferences to be fully persuasive, let alone to reconfigure our understanding of either westward expansion or of American racial ideology.
Dippel identifies the seeds of Free Soil prejudice in seventeenth-century Virginia and follows white nonslaveholding southerners who planted those seeds in frontier zones from the Virginia Piedmont all the way to Oregon and California. Rather than analyze race as a historically contingent cultural construct, he treats it as an essentially ingrained hatred from the time of Nathaniel Bacon s insurgency to Abraham Lincoln s ascendancy. In this formulation, white migrants despised blacks and had no desire to share either the unregulated freedom of frontier zones or the fruits of the subsequent rural economy.
Dippel s case for racist continuity relies on census data which indicates impressive numbers of white Virginians, Kentuckians, and their descendants residing in the southern tier of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), as well as in Missouri and subsequent western territories. He observes that more Kentuckians emigrated to free states than to slave states and indicates that one-third of Oregonians were of southern origins, including almost half of the delegates to the territory s 1857 constitutional convention. Dippel s statistical analysis is especially useful when he is able to link racist legislation and state constitutional provisions to politicians from particular districts where southerners and former southerners settled most heavily. But even these numbers suggest what white plain folk thought about race, without confirming that the desire to be free of exposure to black people was, in and of itself, a principle motivation for moving. Moreover, as Dippel s own account indicates, western migrants from the North to places as far away as Oregon advocated for the same sorts of racially exclusive policies as their southern-descended counterparts.
Dippel s treatment of Free Soil ideology as a persistent southern folk-way with important political manifestations can be quite informative. The final chapter of the book features the story of Tennessee-born, Missouri-raised Peter H. Burnett as an advocate of black exclusion in both the Oregon and California territories. Several hundred miles away from established slave states and in the virtual absence of African Americans, anti-black racism constituted an important force in defining the values of the frontier. Earlier in the book, Dippel provides a brief, effective sketch of Jonathan Jennings s party as it forestalled the spread of slavery to Indiana while also seeking to minimize the black presence in the Hoosier state by refusing to extend the franchise to free blacks. --Indiana Magazine of History, Volume 104, No 2. June 2008.
Race relations undoubtedly shaped the development of the United States. Much of the nation's early history hinges on the American construction of racial identity. Constitutional recognition of human chattel reinforced the subordination and dehumanization of people of African descent during the founding of the New Republic. "King Cotton" further solidified American racial attitudes during the 19th century. Whites Generally occupied a superior station in life relative to blacks by sheer virtue of skin color by the start of the American Civil War. Ironically, sectional and philosophical divisions among some white Americans led to a reduction in the divisions between blacks and whites. Or did they? Race to the Frontier provides readers with an innovative approach to understanding how race and racism shaped life along the western frontier following the Civil War.
John V. H. Dippel's alternative view of westward expansion suggests that northern and midwestern whites who refused to accept blacks as equals migrated westward mainly to avoid effects of black inmigration. According to Dippel, "racial factors were inextricably bound up with the economic well being of these white pioneers ... and, therefore, did contribute significantly to their decisions to migrate and influence the social and political outlook that took hold on the frontier" (p. 5). Dippel supports his conclusion by tracing the nation's race problem from the tidewater region of the Virginia Colony to the Pacific territories. . . . . .
When viewed from this perspective, it is highly plausible that some whites from this era actually fled northern and Midwestern states when confronted with the idea of being surrounded and overrun by a wretched race of subordinates. Dippel's eloquent writing is both entertaining and informative. Impeccable research and historical analysis thoroughly support his conclusion that the consistent pattern of white dispersal across the United States reveals an effort to achieve ... a cohesive, homogeneous, and exclusive society. From colonial days onward, this impulse to flee from a far more complicated racial reality has been an integral, if largely unacknowledged, aspect of the American dream (p. 306).
He makes excellent use of memoirs, newspapers, court records, legislative debates, and special collections. As a bonus, he puts white flight westward in perspective by drawing heavily upon a detailed synthesis of early American history prior to 1877. Undoubtedly, one will fully enjoy reading this book, if one is remotely interested in early American race relations, politics, geographic expansion, slavery, migration, and immigration.
Ervin James III, Texas A&M University College Station, Texas for Pacific Northwest Quarterly
In a recent US political campaign, one candidate's mantra reiterated, "It's about the economy." Paraphrasing that, the westward movement across the US was "about the land." Whether quoting a Native American leader or an agricultural laborer seeking economic opportunity, the issue was land. By contrast, Dippel's intriguing and simultaneously elusive thesis argues a westward expansion driven by racial hatred. Read carefully, the book hauntingly questions the pervasive national US racism, but like many chimerical pursuits, it offers no satisfactory answer.... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty. --CHOICE Magazine Jan 2007
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- PublisherAlgora Publishing
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 0875864228
- ISBN 13 9780875864228
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages350
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