Sons of the Frontier

“I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?” Frank Herbert from God Emperor of Dune

Sometimes I feel like I’m reaching beyond what’s necessary. First and foremost, I seek to RESAVAGE American Men. To radicalize them, at bare minimum, to the level of the Founding Fathers. Academics like to stick to them the liberal ideas of WHY they fought. And maybe it was true for some of the men who put their names to the Declaration of Independence. The men who formed the armies however, probably had different ideas about the matter. Unlike their cousins from across the pond, these men got a taste of true freedom and all the responsibility that freedom entailed.

They understood what it meant to be responsible for themselves. To govern themselves. The frontier resavaged the colonists. It remade them into a new type of man. A new race for a new age. Many of these men probably didn’t read anything other than the Bible. They weren’t seduced by liberal ideas. This was THEIR land and they fought to keep it.

These men were bound by blood. They were born in America. They were AMERICAN. They had no concept of what the Old World was. What they had before them was the dangerous frontier on one side and some empire trying to control them on the other. What made them strong was the life they had to live. A life in accordance with nature because they lived in nature.

The doctrines of nature were instinctual to these men. The colonial army was very poorly equipped. Men would march barefoot after their boots had worn off. Not long after the War for Independence, a sixteen year old Nathan Bedford Forrest went into the forest at night to hunt the panther that had attacked his sister. He hunted it all night before killing it at dawn. Americans were made of something different. There are many stories like this.