Introduction

Summary

This study examines the impact of migration on political participation in antebellum Ohio. The idea that migration, in one form or another, helped to shape American political behavior and institutions is as old as the westward movement itself. In a guide for migrants published in Cincinnati in 1848, for example, John Mason Peck observed that “Migration has become almost a habit, in the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not fifty years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot.” Peck went on to portray wave after wave of frontiersmen passing westward, taming a wilderness, and learning a new way of life from their experiences. This and similar contemporary descriptions of the impact of westward migration on both individuals and their society later emboldened a generation of historians, Frederick Jackson Turner and his students most prominent among them, to focus on the westward movement as an important, even crucial agent in shaping the character of American political life. Today, few historians would argue along with Turner that “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” But the impact of westward migration on American politics, and particularly the Turnerian portrait of “individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy” in the new West, remains a persistent theme within American historiography.