Tuckahoe-Cohee - Comparative History

Comparative History

This distinction is interesting to the comparative historian for two reasons. The first is the general tendency of frontier societies to have extreme class structures. The underlying cause seems to be the difficulty of inducing a peasant to pay rent to a lord where land on the frontier is free for the clearing. The two responses are either an egalitarian society of smallholders with no aristocracy to support a high culture, or some system of slavery or serfdom which requires the peasant to pay rent. Usually there is a combination of the two. The simplest pattern is seen in the South where there is a native zone increasingly disrupted by European colonization, an egalitarian frontier zone, a zone of slavery or serfdom, behind which is the originating society where class relations are less extreme. As the frontier moves westward, the third zone moves into land formerly held by the second, a pattern that is clearest in South Carolina. Variations on this theme can be seen in the South, the North, Canada, Iceland, the Drang nach Osten, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, Australia, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. The best place to start the comparative study of frontiers is William Hardy McNeill's The Great Frontier.

The second reason is the fact represented by West Virginia's slogan Montani Semper Liberi. Great landed estates are usually found in relatively flat country. Mountainous areas are usually inhabited by clannish and warlike smallholders of low culture. West Virginia and surrounding areas can be compared to the egalitarian mountain belt that stretches from Switzerland to Afghanistan. The association of mountains and smallholding is an obvious fact of human society, but no one seems to have ever explained the reason for it.