Summary of the Virgin Land Synoptic Text
The subject of Virgin Land is the function of the West in the American imagination during
the nineteenth-century, the shaping of American society by the westward pull of a "vacant
continent." The study begins with an analysis of the influence of the eighteenth century vision of
transcontinental trade with Asia--the British-inspired ideal of mercanilist dominion over the
seas--on the theorization of national identity in the colonial period. The second part of the work
scrutinizes the origin, transmission, and impact of the hunter/pathfinder figure in history and
literature--as initially exemplified in Daniel Boone and Leatherstocking, respectively--on attitudes
toward settlement of the West. The final third of Virgin Land details extensively the
influence of the idea of the West as a Garden of the World,' in which a virtuous democratic
society would grow up around the agricultural labor of yeoman farmers.
Along the way, Smith discusses the transmission of attitudes toward the West in literature,
sociology, and politics, using as touchstones figures such as Jefferson, Hector St. John de
Crevecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, and
Frederick Jackson Turner. From the poetry of Walt Whitman and the "local color" realism of
Hamlin Garland to the Beadle dime novels and periodical accounts of Buffalo Bill's Wild West
show, Smith surveys both literary and popular fiction for clues to American ideas toward the
West. He demonstrates the influence of these attitudes toward western settlement on the political
machinations of the mid-century period--the "free soil" and "safety valve" theories, the
Homestead Act and the reform of the public land system. Among other things, the West played a
significant part in the formation of the political alliances of the Civil War.
Smith's study ends with an examination of Turner's "Significance of the Frontier in American
History" essay as both a fin de siecle summation of the central tenets of American
agrarianism and as a case study in the contradictions and theoretical dead-ends of the agrarian
ideal. Virgin Land argues persuasively that by century's end, the inward focus and
isolationist impulse of nineteenth-century westward expansion had hampered the United States'
relationship to Europe. Simultaneously, the supremacy in American of contemporary (European)
theories of civilization relegated settlers of the frontier to low social status and hindered
acknowledgement of what was actually new and vigorous about American institutions.
