Rhetoric of the American Frontier

The Moving Frontier

The Move West. After the revolution and in the period from 1800-1850, the American frontier continued to move West. By 1860, the frontier was astride the Great Plains.

The Sodbuster. On the edge of the frontier were the sodbusters. These farmers developed the skill to break the soil, begin their farms, invent communities and then move on. Each generation of Americans trained its children to be sodbusters and the new generation moved West to the new frontier.

The Town. Behind the sodbuster came the town. The town expanded commercialism, providing markets for the shift from subsistence to commercial farming. New technologies became available to the farmer and the farmer entered the money economy. In the town, a mercantile class developed -- people who were not engaged in farming but dependent on the farm economy. The towns also provided the court house square and the chautauqua grounds as places for public life.

The problem of the frontier: to make a community in the vast expanse of the frontier. The land grid in the West, the granting of homesteads in 160 acre plots, and the requirement that farmers live on their homestead meant that as few as four families lived on a square mile and your nearest neighbor could be as much as a half mile from your homestead. So, how to create a public life under these conditions?

Plot: Stories of individuals confronting challenges and triumphing over them. Small, everyday challenges of survival, or big, even exaggerated, challenges.
Protagonist: The ordinary person made extraordinary by their achievement. The protagonist might triumph over an antagonist or over nature.
Often driven by the spirit of individual power to overcome challenges
Often grounded in the errand of progress. Errand guided the nation through the striving of the individual and his kind.

Tallness substituted for the material spaciousness. Tallness was materially spacious, but framed as an experiential narrative of dubious truth.
The style was hyper-sentimental. It stimulated emotional vocally in response. Your job was not only to listen but to respond. Response was left open by the speaker. He stimulated you rather than telling you specifically what sentiments you should have. An Enthymatic style .
Repeated iterations. The stories were told again and again, although in an extemporaneous style with varied content rather than as polished performance.
This was the Ungenteel Style

Heavy involvement of audience. Contrasted with the sentimental style. Used call response and relied on the experiential basis of tallness.
Language was colloquial and ungrammatical.
Central was the crudeness of frontier experience

Analogy to narratives. Narratives were told and lessons drawn from them. Thus, the narrative becomes a form of proof by extensioon.
Narratives of progress told as well.

A speaker builds authority by emphasizing his/her connection to ordinary people.
Could also tell narratives of with you as protagonist

From Virginia frontier, the idea of being "good for the community" but now more "good for all the individuals in the community." More individualized.
Proof by common sense experience rather than by mechanism or history.
New ideographs of <progress>, <conquering>, <American destiny>, even <wonder> drawn from influence of tall tales.

Evangelical circuit riders: no formal training, preaching was a call, no particular theology, exhortation was the object
An ungenteel style: narrative of conversion experience and emotionalism were characteristic.

Frontier politics filled with heroes and devils
Politics was participatory. Audience loudly and actively involved in the speaking. Call response and cheers.
Speaking heavy with expansionism and taming of the continent

A populist rhetoric. Rhetoric of the frontier caught up a people into public life through its style (call/response, its ordinariness) and its basic celebration of the power of the common citizen

Although slavery was a suppressed issue in the Senate, it was a lively discussion on the frontier. Invent a tall tale to help you make a point about supporting or opposing slavery.
With the help of the power of government, the railroad is about to take your property to put through a rail line. Write a short message that you might have delivered to your neighbors on the evils of the railroad.
The railroad is not taking your land, but someone else's. Write a short speech in which you argue why your neighbors should welcome the coming of the railroad.