8 A government of limited powers
system, ensuring that no section of the government could exercise supreme
power. To these limitations on the power of government the Bill of Rights
added another set of checks to the exercise of power, but it did not guarantee
that all Americans were free from oppression. The Bill of Rights was directed
against the federal government, and its framers intended that each state
should be left to safeguard the rights of its citizens. However, two groups of
people who lived in America, most of whom had been born there, were not
citizens: the first group were slaves, the second American Indians (Native
Americans). The Constitution did not abolish slavery, although it did give
Congress the power to abolish the slave trade, but not before 1808. Slavery
was eventually abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Con-
stitution, but the rights of the former slaves, and of their descendants, were
not secured by the constitutions of the states, certainly not in the South. In
the Southern states laws were passed setting up racial segregation in educa-
tion, in transport, and in public and private facilities such as libraries and
restaurants. Blacks were excluded from the exercise of the vote, and often
subjected to ‘mob justice’, the rule of the lynch mob. It was not until the mid-
twentieth century that the Supreme Court of the United States extended the
protection of the Bill of Rights to the areas covered by state law, and racial
discrimination, political manipulation and the improper use of police pow-
ers came under judicial scrutiny. The American Indians, later to be confined
to reservations, were not citizens. Chief Justice Marshall summed up their
legal status in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831. Indians, he said
were ‘in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles
that of a ward to his guardian.’ At the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth citizenship was extended on a piecemeal basis to
Indians, for example to those who had served in the armed forces in the First
World War, but it was not until 1924 that all Indians were made citizens of
the United States.
Unity and diversity
The settlement of the area that now forms the United States involved a long,
continuous process of expansion from the original colonies established on
the eastern seaboard, a process that has not ended even at the present time.
The vast influx of population into Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in re-
cent years and the development of Alaska represent, in differing ways, the
last stages of the passing of that phenomenon that dominated the history of
America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the moving
frontier.
The moving frontier of settlers, with its saga of pioneering feats, of cow-
boys, of Indian fighters and of the life of its frontier towns, has been proposed
by some historians as the prime explanation of the nature of American soci-
ety, American politics and even the American national character. Whatever
the exact importance of the frontier, the broad outlines of its significance for