THE FRONTIERSMAN IN THE FIELD

OF EARLY LEGISLATION.

PAPER BY

A. L. HENSON,

OF CALHOUN,

The ever changing American frontier of the early days was sharply distinguished from the European frontier-a fortified boundary line running through dense population; from the Chinese frontier-the great wall; and from the mediaeval frontier of Scotland-the debatable ground at the head of Solway Firth. No natural feautre existed to mark the place where the territory of the settlers began and where that of the Indian ended. This American frontier had many distinguishing features. It was the meeting point between savagery and civilization-the edge of settlementand in the march of civilization westward it was the outer edge of the farthest wave.

The settled State very carefully guarded its frontier. This was the first duty to its citizens. Not so with our American frontier. It was its function to protect the interior, and to compensate for this, certain privileges and immunities such as exemption from taxes, grant of lands and the services of ministers gratis was not uncommon.

Every student of history has observed how in the settlement of America European life entered the continent and how the rugged environment influenced that life and reacted on Europe. The frontier was the line of the most rapid. and effective Americanism. The wilderness all but mastered the colonist. It found him European in dress, industries, tools, arms and modes of travel. It took him from the coach and placed him in the birch canoe. It stripped him of the

garments of civilization and clothed him in the hunting skins of the red men. It put him in the log hut of the Cherokee and Iriquois and ran an Indian palisade around him. Soon he plants Indian corn and plows ground wth a sharp stick. He shouts the war cry and takes scalps in orthodox fashion. The environment is at first stronger than the man, but he must accept the condition which it furnishes or perish, so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness-he conquers it but the outcome is not European, not simply the development of the Germanic germs any more than the first phenomenon was the cause of the reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, we have a new product and it is American.

At first the frontier was the Atlantic Coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very large sense. Moving westwardly the frontier becomes more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier settlement leaves its traces behind it and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus, the frontier has meant a steady movement away from European influences; a steady growth of independence along American lines, and thus has the frontiersman left on every settled and established community his impress largely molding for all time the political, social and economic order.

It is the character of this settler of the frontier belt, who carved out of the wilderness his truck patches and who carried civilization to the "hither edge of free land," and particularly as that character is reflected in his legislation, petitions to the General Court and other legal papers and records, that it shall be the purpose of this paper to discuss.

The delicate shades of thought and feeling of a people, and especially of the Anglo-Saxon people, with their intense love of independent Igislative bodies, of the trial by jury and the right to assemble and petition, is more truly reflected in official records than in its literature. Witness the presentments of your local grand jury and see with what intimate

knowledge they discuss local civic affairs and how truly they interpret the thought and feelings of their fellows.

When the West had become the East and after many of the "indenture servants" had completed terms of service to the proprietors on the coast and had advanced into the forests and established frontier settlements the conclusion was reached that the best way of "settling in co-habitation upon the said land," runs a quaint statute, "frontiers within this government will be by encouragement to induce societies of men to undertake the same." In this statute it was declared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty fighting men in each "society" and provision was made for a grant of land to each society (town) for a land grant of not less than ten thousand acres and not more than thirty thousand acres upon any of the frontiers to be held in common by the society. The statute continues: "provided always and it shall be the true intent of this Act that for every five hundred acres of land to be granted in pursuance of this Act there shall be and shall be continually kept upon said land one Christian man between the ages of sixteen and sixty years of age, perfect of limb, able and fit for service, who shall also be continually provided with a well fixed musquett, or fuzee, a good pistol, sharp simeter, tomahawk, and five pounds of good clean pistol powder and twenty pounds of sizable leaden bullets or swan or goose shot to be kept within the fort directed by this Act, beside the powder and shot for his necessary or useful shooting of game."

Within two years the society was to cause a half-acre of the middle of the co-habitation to be palisaided with good sound palisades, at least thirteen feet long, six inches in diameter in the middle of the length thereof and set double at least three feet in the ground."

As early as 1645 these "societies" were officially designated as frontier towns and so necessary were they to the security of the colonists of the east that the inhabitants were forbidden under severe penalties to move without permission.

An Act of March 12, 1694, by the General Court of

Massachusetts enumerated the frontier towns which the inhabitants were forbidden to desert on pain of losing their lands, if landholders; and imprisonment if not landholders, unless permission was first obtained. These frontier towns were: Wells, York, Kittery, Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable, Clemsford, Groton, Lancaster, Malborough and Deerfield. In March, 1699, Brookfield, Madon and Woodstock, together with seven others, "tho they be not frontiers as those towns first named yet bye more open than many others to an attack of the enemy."

In the spring of 1704 the General Court of Connecticut followed closely the Act of Massachusetts and named as her frontier towns not to be deserted: Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester, Windham, Mansfield and Plainfield. Concord, Sudbury and Dedham "being inland towns and but thinly peopled" were also subject to such legislation.

About the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier line through New England. The line, passing through the towns enumerated represents: (1) the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the Merrimac and its tributaries, a region threatened from Indian country by way of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian Indians by way of Lake Champlain and the Winooski River route to the Connecticut; (3) boundary towns which marked the edge of that inferior agricultural regions where the hard crystalline rocks furnish a later foundation for Shay's rebellion, opposition to the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the abandoned farm; and (4) the isolated intervale of Brookfield which lay immediately between these frontiers.

It should be borne in mind that this seemingly hard limitation placed upon the liberties of the inhabitants of the frontier towns was quite as necessary to the frontier town as to the town along the coast. The inhabitants had built

log huts, and felled forests for their truck patches on the faith that all would remain within the settlement and the faithful observance of this obligation on the part of each was necessary for the preservation of all.

True to the experience of all other states, the seizing of land afforded the principal causes for litigation and complaint. The absentee landlord living in security in the east while the frontiersman guarded his land was the subject of no little contempt. The actual ownership of the land made very little difference at first. There was plenty of land but not plenty of men to hold it. Here began the fight on the part of the proprietors to establish the feudal system of Europe and the equally determined fight on the part of the frontiersman to create an entirely new system of tenure, the nature of which they didn't at that time know. The results of this fight are the laws now on our statute books governing alienation and ownership of land. A petition of Deerfield to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1678 indicates their feelings with respect to the distribution of the land:

"You may be pleased to know that the very principle & best of the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as lying ye center and middle of the town; & as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or 9 proprietors each and every of which are never like to come to a settlement amongst us, which we have formerly found grievous & doe Judge for the future will be found intollerable if not altered. Or minister, Mr. Mather__ & we ourselves are

much discouraged as judging the planation will be spoiled if these proprietors may not be begged, or will not be bought up on very easy terms out of their Right. . . . .But as long as the maine of the plantation lies in men's hands that can't improve it themselves, neither are ever like to putt such tenants on to it as shall be likely to advance the good of ye place in civil or sacred respects; he, ourselves and all others that think of going to it are much discouraged."

In another communication to the Court they say: "let the Great Men whom the land belongs to come and defend it."