Race to the Frontier : White Flight and Westward Expansion

Dippel, John V. H.

ISBN 10: 0875864228 / ISBN 13: 9780875864228

Edité par Algora Publishing, 2005

Former library copy. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. N° de réf. du vendeur 45117715-75

Synopsis :

Race relations were an important driving force in the move to settle the West, as the political records and personal accounts show. Race to the Frontier provides an analysis of this little-discussed but essential facet of American history.

Race to the Frontier reveals a hidden dimension of American westward expansion—one driven not just by economic opportunity, but by racial anxiety and the deliberate construction of an all-white society. John V. H. Dippel traces how white settlers across three centuries systematically moved west to escape, rather than embrace, a multiracial America.

Beginning in colonial Virginia’s Tidewater region, Dippel shows how poor whites, displaced by the rising dominance of African slavery, pushed into the Piedmont seeking economic independence. As tobacco exhausted the soil and large plantations consolidated wealth, landless farmers had nowhere to go but inland. This pattern repeated itself across the continent: whenever blacks—enslaved or free—became economically competitive or demographically significant, white settlers fled westward.

The book traces this migration through Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, where wealthy planters imported slaves while poor whites retreated to the hills, creating a stratified frontier society. It follows settlers across the Ohio River into territories explicitly designed to exclude slavery, not from moral conviction alone, but because northern farmers feared competing against slave labor. The narrative continues through Missouri, where the question of whether new territories would permit slavery became the central political crisis leading to the Civil War.

Dippel examines primary documents and contemporary accounts to show how settlers actively worked to keep blacks out through legal exclusion laws, discriminatory policies, and deliberate settlement patterns. He profiles figures like Peter Burnett, who promoted Oregon settlement by emphasizing its remoteness from both slavery and free black populations—a "racial freedom" that appealed to displaced Southern farmers.

The book challenges the romantic frontier mythology that celebrates westward movement as democratic expansion and individual opportunity. Instead, it reveals how racial exclusion was woven into land policies, territorial organization, and the very concept of the American West as a refuge for whites. The author shows how economic motivations and racial fears became inseparable, how competing visions of slavery’s expansion created sectional conflict, and how ordinary settlers’ desire for racial separation contributed to the nation’s drift toward civil war.

This history illuminates how America’s geographic expansion was fundamentally shaped by race—how the dream of a fresh start westward was, for many, a dream of starting over without Black Americans.

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : Race to the Frontier : White Flight and ...
Éditeur : Algora Publishing
Date d'édition : 2005
Reliure : Couverture souple
Etat : Very Good