Author's note: I would like to thank Werner Sollors, Malcolm Rohrbough, and Geraldine Murphy, as well as the University of Iowa for a summer research grant and the American Association of University Women for the grant with which this study began.

1. Osgood, Samuel, “Our Lessons in Statesmanship,” Harper's Monthly 30 (03 1865): 477.Google Scholar Future references to entries in Harper's Monthly will be made parenthetically in the text.

2. Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Simonson, Harold P. (New York: Ungar, 1980), p. 34.Google Scholar

3. Examining Turner's early impact on Southern historians is Lieber, Todd M., “The Significance of the Frontier in the Writing of Antebellum Southern History,” Mississippi Quarterly 22 (1969): 337–54.Google Scholar Lieber concludes that Turner's theories “have been accepted as a usable tool for interpreting the period preceding the spread of the Cotton Kingdom and rejected for the period from 1820 to the Civil War, when historians seemed to find it necessary to explain Southern history in terms of the coming of Civil War” (p. 354). Recent overviews of the continuing response to Turner's analysis include Cronon, William, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (1987): 157–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul, Rodman W. and Malone, Michael P., “Tradition and Challenge in Western Historiography,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (1985): 27–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gressley, Gene M., “Whither Western American History? Speculations on a Direction,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (1984): 493–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Putnam, Jackson K., “The Turner Thesis and the Westward Movement: A Reappraisal,” Western Historical Quarterly 7 (1976): 377–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Summing up the Turner “legacy” on which scholars continue to draw, William Cronon writes that “the frontier thesis, in effect, set American space in motion and gave it a plot” (p. 166).Google Scholar As a story that Americans told about themselves, if not as a thorough study of settlement patterns along the frontier, Turner's thesis remains provocative and culturally charged.

4. Lynd, Staughton, “On Turner, Beard, and Slavery,” in his Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 135–52Google Scholar, usefully augmented by Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 3–43, 47–83, 118–64Google Scholar; Benson, Lee, Turner andBeard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), pp. 41–91Google Scholar; and Malin, James C., “Space and History: Reflections on the Closed-Space Doctrines of Turner and Mackinder and the Challenge of Those Ideas by the Air Age, Part 1,” Agricultural History 18 (04 1944): 65–74.Google Scholar In the years since Lynd advised viewing slavery as “a key to the meaning of our national experience,” scholarly treatment of the peculiar institution and of African-American experience in and out of the South has increased substantially. Recent measures of this considerable literature include Abzug, Robert H. and Maizlish, Stephen E., eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986)Google Scholar; and Hine, Darlene Clark, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).Google Scholar Looking to the West, meanwhile, Linda Kerber has traced the abolitionist emphasis on larger racial prejudices in “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,” Journal of American History 62 (1975): 271–95.Google Scholar In “Recognition, Racism, and Reflections on the Writing of Western Black History,” Lawrence B. de Graaf has protested the “invisibility” of black Americans in traditional studies of the West; see Pacific Historical Quarterly 44 (1975): 22–51.Google Scholar In “W. E. B. DuBois and Frederick Jackson Turner: The Unveiling and Preemption of America's ‘Inner History’,” William Toll has pointed out the central function of race in DuBois's assessment of America's unique heritage, an assessment contemporary with Turner's that was popularly and institutionally slighted; see Pacific Northwest Quarterly 65 (04 1974): 66–78.Google Scholar By contrast, George R. Woolfolk has lent unexpected support to Turner, 's “safety-valve”Google Scholar theory be examining the movement of free Negroes into Texas and the West in “Turner's Safety Valve and Free Negro Westward Migration,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 56 (1965): 125–30.Google Scholar Also important in discerning 19th-century perspectives is the extent to which the antislavery movement finally enlisted the appeal of the frontier, especially in promoting the issue of slavery's spread to the territories when the Kansas—Nebraska Bill was proposed in 1854. See Bormann, Ernest G., The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 171–95Google Scholar; and Diffley, Kathleen, “‘Erecting Anew the Standard of Freedom’: Salmon P. Chase's ‘Appeal of the Independent Democrats' and the Rise of the Republican Party,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (11 1988): 401–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Ivins, William M. Jr, On the Rationalization of Sight (1938; rept. New York: Da Capo, 1973), p. 7.Google Scholar Bryan Jay Wolf extends the concept of a visual grammar to incorporate social context in “All the World's a Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal 44 (1984): 328–37Google Scholar; see too his “Preface” to Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. xiii–xviii.Google Scholar Roger B. Stein calls such systematic coding “an expressive language,” which is as useful to the cultural critic in reading a work of art as it is to the artist in reading the world. See “Structure as Meaning: Towards a Cultural Interpretation of American Painting,” American Art Review 3, no. 2 (1976): 66–78Google Scholar; “Reader's Response by Patrick L. Stewart,” American Art Review 3, no. 5 (1976): 49–52Google Scholar; “Editorial Reply by Roger B. Stein,” American Art Review 3, no. 5 (1976): 52–55Google Scholar; and Heath, Stephen, “Narrative Space,” Screen 17, no. 3 (1976): 68–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Roque, Oswaldo Rodriguez, “The Exaltation of American Landscape Painting,” in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), pp. 21–48Google Scholar; Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Crandell, Gina M., “When Art Challenges Beauty,” Landscape 29, no. 1 (1986): 10–16Google Scholar; Clark, Kenneth, Landscape into Art (New York: Icon-Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 108–45Google Scholar; Gowing, Lawrence, “Nature and the Ideal in the Art of Claude Lorrain,” Art Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1974): 91–97Google Scholar; Kitson, Michael, Claude Lorrain: Landscape with the Nymph Egeria (Newcastle on Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1968)Google Scholar; Roethlisberger, Marcel, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), vol. 1Google Scholar, Critical Catalogue; and Hussey, Christopher, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (1927; rept. London: Cass, 1967), pp. 2–82.Google Scholar Examining the discernible shift in artistic purpose that the picturesque inaugurated, Hussey observes: “Classical art makes you think, imaginative art makes you feel. But picturesque art merely makes you see” (p. 245).Google Scholar That was enough to prove crucial in 19th-century America, which founded much of its rhetoric on how the continent was seen.

7. For the particularly American appeal of Durand's landscapes, see Lawall, David B., Introduction, A. B. Durand, 1796–1886, Exhibition Catalogue, Montclair Art Museum (Newark, N. J.: Schillat-Farrell, 1971)Google Scholar; Craven, Wayne, “Asher B. Durand's Imaginary Landscapes,” Antiques 116 (1979): 1120–27Google Scholar; Langer, Sandra L., “The Aesthetics of Democracy,” Art Journal 80, no. 2 (1979): 132–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novak, Barbara, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience, 2nd ed. (New York: Icon-Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 80–91Google Scholar; and Czestochowski, Joseph S., The American Landscape Tradition (New York: Dutton, 1982), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar For the emergence of the viewer as the strongest organizing variable in the Renaissance discovery of perspective, see Arnheim, Rudolf, Art and Visual Perception, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 283–302.Google Scholar

8. Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 22.Google Scholar

9. Slave narratives have received increasing attention, including Smith, Valerie, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 9–43Google Scholar; Tanner, Laura E., “Self-Conscious Representation in the Slave Narrative,” Black American Literature Forum 21 (1987): 415–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Charles T. and Gates, Henry Louis Jr, eds., The Slave's Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Margolies, Edward, “Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives: Their Place in American Literary History,” Studies in Black Literature 4, no. 3 (1973): 1–8.Google Scholar For the plantation tradition, see Taylor, William R., Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper and Row, 1957)Google Scholar and Gaines, Francis Pendleton, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925).Google Scholar