The New World seemed to be born in violence and reared on mayhem. It is the subject of many scholarly works on early America. It seems that the violence of the old world was merely imported to the new with those hoping for something different. Here are some of the more popular views on the subject.

Much of the point of view Americans had in the 18th and 19th centuries can be found in the literature of the time. It is also represented by some early analysis like that discussed in The Fatal Environment (Slotkin, 1998). He quotes an early analysis of America by a yeoman farmer:

Crevecoeur sees America as divided into four metaphorical environments, running north to south through all the colonies. Each section has its own geography or natural character, which determines the type of economic, social and political institutions and the sorts of human characters that develop there. The Eastern seacoast is described in terms appropriate to our notions of the Metropolis: it faces Europe, engages in trade and exploitation of marine resources; and it is the realm of merchants, adventurous and commercial in character, sharing both the cultural advances and the ‘vices’ of Europe—greed and ambition for power in particular.

At the opposite extreme is the world of the Indian: the wilderness, which hunting is the mode of subsistence and savagery the form of social organization. The wilderness dweller too has particular virtues and vices—he has the ‘natural’ morality and ‘nobility’ of those who live close to nature and far from cities, yet he is an abysmal barbarian, politically anarchic, violent, capable of great cruelty.

Infringing on Indian territory is the third region, the border, on which adventurous outriders of civilization mingle with the Indians, modifying wilderness in the direction of civilization while themselves acquiring a taste for still wilder freedoms. The borderers are the most dangerous and antisocial characters in the system for even the Indians have a tribal organization, while the borderer is a solitary individualist, recognizing no law but his own will and appetite.

Between the border and coast and graded internally in according to levels of development, Crevecouer locates the realm of the American farmer. It is a utopian district, freed at once of the Indian menace and the corruptions of the city (1998:71)…

These four distinct areas of the New World compare to what we now see as urban and rural. Each has a different density of development and residence. We move as easily from country to city today and it seems appalling that anyone could have described one as safe and the other not. If anything cities are now seen as more violent than the countryside, a notion that must have been as alien as Mars to many early settlers in America.

Slotkin also discusses two very distinct themes running through frontier literature. One is the idea of being captured by the Indians, as in Coopers Last of the Mohicans and the other is the hunter. Being a captive or enslaved by the Indians was an almost universal archetype of terror for women and was reminiscent of traveling to hell and living with Satan himself. It was at once a journey into a savage past away from organized religion and in some way retribution for failure to comport to the doctrine of the time. Great fears are always the subject of great books and the literati picked up on this theme early on and it continued into the western expansion in the story of Quanna Parker.

The myth of the hunter is similar to that of the captive in that the Christian is to be asked to overcome the savagery of the wilderness and retain the principles set down in the Ten Commandments, despite the demands to the contrary by wild animals, Indians and backwoods miscreants. The message here is simple and tells much of what was going on at the time: Do not go “native”; do not forsake your race, heritage and upbringing to live among godless savages in what Slotkin calls “regression” (1998: 63).

The hunter myth creates many unforgettable characters who eschew the life of the city to further the conquest of the frontier. He is a friend of the Indians and also their master. He opens up the country to pioneers for settlement. Benjamin Church, Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill come to mind. He is not the yeoman farmer nor the Planter or city merchant. It is clear the hunter is one of those backwoods people always described as hunting deer and as savage as the Indians.

He is the agent of an expansive colonial society, rather than the symbol of a colonial culture adrift in an alien landscape and filled with a sense of peril and anxiety. He is an individualist, bent on establishing himself outside the pale of colonial authority and at times even shares the Indian’s antipathy for the colonial authorities—for although the hunter as hero is never a renegade, he speaks for a class of pioneers who were viewed by Metropolitan society as approaching the status of social outcasts, rebels or renegades (1998:64).

There was apparently a very thin line between the Daniel Boones and the squatters on Indian lands so detested by all. Many of our great American heroes came from that group of despised backwoods ruffians who knew the Indians, perhaps lived with them and traded with them, marrying into a tribe and perhaps having another wife and family in the city.

Courtwright (1998) concedes New England may have not been as violent because of the religious groups who settled it were more devout and that Southern and Western Americans faced Indians and slavery and were forced to carry weapons. But that a main factor was gender:

Anyone who looks closely at the underside of American history will find mostly young and single men. They have accounted for far and away the largest share homicides, riots, drug dealing and the like. This pattern is common to all societies. But the American experience with young, single men has been unusually bad because, until recently, the country has had a higher proportion of them in the population than the European, African and Asian nations from which the immigrants came (1998:2).

Aside from the obvious nature of crime and gender were the “codes of honor”, especially in the South, which made conflict resolution difficult except through violence. We all know the story of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and the famous duel, but other famous Americans were involved in “honor” killings. Button Gwinnett, one of the signers of the Constitution was killed by Lachlan McIntosh, apolitical rival, in a duel over political issues. Georgia Governor Jackson was known as the “prince of duelists” for the 23 occasions he met opponents “on the field of honor”. He had 3 duels with rival Robert Watkins including a “gouging” attempt (Cook 2005: 73).

Courtwright considered other factors in his discussion of the violent society and placed this group of criminals on the frontiers of the nation:

The mixture of demographic, cultural and social characteristics guaranteed that American society would experience unusually high levels of violence and disorder, but not that American society would be uniformly violent and disorderly. These troublesome elements: the surplus of young men, widespread bachelorhood, sensitivity about honor, racial hostility, heavy drinking, religious indifference, group indulgence in vice, ubiquitous armament and inadequate law enforcement---were conscentrated on the frontier (1998:3)…

Whether the idea of young unmarried men can be attributed to all crime for all times is another matter. Courtwright discusses the modern ghetto and places some of the frontier elements there. I would disagree and indicate the city, with its ethnic boundaries is probably a proximal equivalent of a national or ethnic border, rather than a frontier. As such it is possible he does not consider the border factor as much as others do. The whole idea of “sanctuary cities” evokes a Cave in Rock, Ohio, or Hole in the Wall, Kansas image of inner cities. But that is a discussion for another day. Slotkin’s Fatal Environment (1998) carries this theme further quoting Frederick Law Olmstead and others who refer to the South as 5 times as violent as the North (1998:18). He adds to the mix of gender and honor and restlessness the ethnic Scotch-Irish nature. Historians continue to note the puritan identity of the northeast, the Pennsylvania Dutch and the distinctly scotch-irish South; the latter being identified across the board as the most violent prone (1998:24). Slotkin offers the Scotch-Irish up as predestined to violence by nature of their experience vis a vis England:

Like the puritans these immigrants were likely to arrive as family units . Sometimes entire communities emigrated together. Unlike Virginia Cavalier culture, gender ration should not have made these immigrants particularly violent. Instead they brought a culture of violence with them. Two differing theories have been offered to explain this level of violence.

One theory holds that the absence of effective government created a culture in which private violence, both defensive and offensive was the only practical way to survive.…Another theory argues that the Scotch-Irish culture of violence was a product of an economy based on herding caused by marginal agricultural lands (1998:27, 28).

The first theory is borne out in the use of “regulators” as mobs to clean up North and South Carolina and relies much on the nasty nature of conditions on the border areas of Scotland and England and Ireland and England, but once again we come up to the reality that’s these are border wars and the border is the reason for the conflict. The second theory is perhaps more shaky, though it may have some credence in talking about the cattle days in the old west. In the south horses were nearly the only livestock readily available and horse thievery was probably the most common offense against others in the South. Horses ran free in the back woods and changed hands many times, making it hard to determine whether horses were stolen or ran away. The nature of the Cracker and even the Indian lifestyle made it easy for horses to be taken.

The herding theory also suggests these immigrants were forcibly removed from lands and banished en masse to the New World, which fits in well with the view that Britain was populating America with criminals and undesirables from their border regions. The influx of such ruffians must have caused some discomfiture among the puritans and other religious settlers. Slotkin notes that these new immigrants were used by the older more established colonists as “fencing” to keep the Indians Spanish and French out.

…Their disorderly behavior caused the Quakers in Pennsylvania to encourage these quarrelsome and prideful people to settle the back country, moving them away from polite, ordered Quaker society. More important from the standpoint of later American history, the Scotch-Irish became a highly militant shield between pacifist Quaker Pennsylvania and the Indians.

….Virginia Governor George Gooch gave guarantees to Scotch-Irishmen that they would be allowed to exercise their non-Anglican religion in the GreatValley. By doing so the Scots-Irish became a buffer between settled Virginians and the Indians (1998:30)…

(from History of the Pony Club, unpublished)

2005 Cook, James F., The Governors of Georgia, Mercer Univ. Press: Macon.

1998. Courtwright, David T, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City, Harvard Univ. Press: Cambridge.

1998 Slotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890, Univ. Of Oklahoma Press: Norman.

Frontier Violence: a surplus of young single men