Book Description

The Missouri frontier of the early nineteenth century was a microcosm of the frontier that had already swept its way across the Alleghenies and would ultimately reach the Pacific. Stump, Bar, and Pulpit tells what the frontiersman was saying about himself and his times, in the legislative halls, the courtroom, the camp meeting, and the village square. Here are the themes and styles of the holiday orations and the political rallies, the commencements and the sermons, the debates and the duels. The frontier of Stump, Bar, and Pulpit was a complex society witgh many forces operating, but the often colorful rhetoric of the day generally affirms the interpretation of the frontier as a region of great social and economic mobility. True, some of the assumptions made by the speakers and their listeners were myth, but they believed each to be true and acted upon them. they saw the frontier as the garden spot of the world--instead of the often grim and always testing environment that it was. They believed it held out unlimited economic opportunity--despite abundant evidence of the sometimes cruel and capricious nature that reduced so many to penury and near-starvation. Above all, they voiced a faith in social equality and in the ability of the common man to govern, and were so insisten in their faith that even those who opposed the domination of the masses were powerless to keep them in control. the rehtoric of the frontier was rich in humor, but Stump, Bar, and Pulpit views it neither as quaint nor absurd. Instead, it is shown as an expression of the thoughts of a people deliberating over problems of immediate urgency to them and ultimate importance to the nation in the tumultuous period we have come to identify with Jacksonian democracy.