Making the Frontier Man

Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry

Matthew C. Ward

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822990024
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimized killing as a means of self-defense—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbors declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds.
Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Making Men and Making Violence
• Chapter One. Peaceable Men, Peaceable Kingdoms? Violence, Authority, and White Manhood in the Backcountry before the Forty Years’ War
• Chapter Two. Heaven Is a Kentucky of a Place: Migration and the Shaping of White Manhood
• Chapter Three. The Dark and Bloody Ground: The Forty Years’ War and the Shaping of White Manhood and Authority
• Chapter Four. They That Ain’t Cowards Follow Me: Warfare and Trauma
• Chapter Five. White Savages: Authority, Manhood, and Interracial Violence
• Chapter Six. The Unpromised Land: Disappointment and White Manhood
• Chapter Seven. One of Those Feminine Men: The Challenge of Elite Hegemony
• Chapter Eight. The New Sodom: The Challenge to Elite Authority
• Chapter Nine. Justice from the Law Is Fled: The Decline of the Courts’ Authority in the Early West
• Chapter Ten. Half Men: White Manhood, Violence, and Guns
• Chapter Eleven. (Re)Constructing the Frontiersman
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index