FRONTIERSMAN AND SOLDIER 227 



settler of Tennessee or Kentucky would be very likely 

 to take the law into his own hands. From this have 

 come the vendettas, the street righting, the lynch law, 

 so conspicuous in the history of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. I am inclined to think that a chief cause of this 

 difference between New England and the Southwest is 

 to be found in a difference in the methods by which 

 the two regions were settled. Rarely, if ever, in New 

 England did individuals or families advance singly 

 into the forest to make new homes for themselves. 

 The migration was always a migration of organized 

 communities. Town budded from town, as in ancient 

 Greece ; and the outermost town in the skirts of the 

 wilderness carried with it, not only the strict disci- 

 pline of church and schoolhouse, but also the whole 

 apparatus of courts and judges, jails and constables, 

 complete and efficient. This was the peculiar fea- 

 ture of the settlement of New England that saved 

 it from the turbulence usually characteristic of frontier 

 communities. When people can obtain justice, with 

 reasonable certainty and promptness, at the hands of 

 the law, they are not likely to be tempted to take the 

 law into their own hands. The turbulence among 

 our Western pioneers was only an ordinary instance 

 of what happens on frontiers where for a time the 

 bonds that hold together the complicated framework 

 of society are somewhat loosened. 



This hardy population, which thrust itself into all 

 parts of the West, from the prairies of Illinois to the 

 highlands of northern Alabama, was intensely Ameri- 

 can and intensely national in its feelings. These 

 people differed from the planters of South Carolina or 

 Louisiana almost as much as from the merchants and 



