forever remain untroubled by the white man's cupidity. The execution of the removal policy was accomplished in the thirties. An additional incentive to migration was given in 1820 by new land laws. From the view-point of the federal treasury the law of 1800 had not worked well. Many purchasers under the credit system, expecting to meet deferred payments through the profits of resale or cultivation, defaulted in their obligations. Since whole communities were sometimes delinquent, eviction proved impracticable. The land code was therefore revised. The credit system was abolished, but to offset the hardship of cash payments the minimum price of lands was reduced from $2 to $1.25 per acre, and the size of the tract which might be bought to eighty acres. The auction system was retained, but it was now easier than ever before for the poor man to obtain possession of land. For a decade or more after 1815 the chief force in pushing the frontier onward was the Piedmont stock. From the interior counties of the South Atlantic states, and from Kentucky and Tennessee to which this stock had contributed Boone and the other transalleghany pioneers of the eighteenth century, thousands of settlers poured into both Northwest and Southwest. From the same Kentucky neighborhood the families of Abraham Lincoln and of Jefferson Davis removed, the one to Indiana, the other to Mississippi. Quakers, Baptists, and other antislavery sects from Virginia and the Carolinas chose new homes in the Northwest because slavery was not allowed. The steam-boat appeared on the western waters (1812) and gave command of up-stream navigation on the important rivers. The bottom lands of southern Indiana and Illinois filled up with small farms. After 1820 any man who possessed a hundred dollars could exchange it for eighty acres of government land and become the owner of a farm in fee simple. Want of this small sum was hardly a deterrent, however, to thousands of poor men, and squatting became extremely common; the public domain was so vast that the practice had the sanction of public opinion in the West, and even the government was lax in enforcing the law against trespassers. The advantage which the auction system of disposing of lands gave to speculators, the squatters overcame by banding together in land-claims associations. Such organizations generally succeeded, by collusion or intimidation where necessary, in preventing any except actual occupants from bidding for occupied lands at the sales. Many of the people who came to the Northwest in these years were extremely poor. Some of them brought their entire worldly possessions in wheelbarrows or packs upon their backs, and spent their first winter in "half-faced camps." These were rude shelters of poles, backed by a huge fallen log, with the southern face open to the weather. Such a camp was the home of the Lincolns for a year after their removal to Indiana in 1816, when Abraham was a boy of seven. It was replaced by a one-room log cabin which had no floor, and no covering, even of deer-skin, for the holes which served as windows and door. The table and chairs were mere slabs with legs fitted into holes. Abraham's bed was "a heap of dry leaves in the corner of the loft, to which he mounted by means of pegs driven into the wall." Prior to 1830 most of New England's emigrants went to central and western New York or to Ohio. After the opening of the Erie Canal they began to reach the remoter Northwest. The project of the canal to join the lakes and Hudson River had long been discussed by New Yorkers, who cherished the hope - until Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill - that it would be adopted as part of a comprehensive national system. Disappointed by the veto the work was begun as a state enterprise. It was ready for use in 1825 and became a great route for westward-bound emigrants. Steam-boats, in use on the Lakes after 1819, connected with the canal at Buffalo and brought the pioneers to southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Approaching from the Northeast, they entered the prairies and became the first successful cultivators of lands which from their lack of trees had been regarded as infertile.1 1 A beginning had been made in southern Illinois in cultivating the prairie lands adjoining the wooded bottoms of the streams. The "Piedmontese" carried the small farm of the pioneer type into Alabama and Mississippi as well as into the Northwest. But here was an opportunity for the planter, and the small farmer was not able to hold his ground. Capitalism in the form of the seeker after good cotton lands bid up the price at the auctions to $20 or $30 per acre, and occasionally much more. Choice lands already in the hands of small farmers were secured by the offer of prices which the owners could not afford to refuse, when other good lands farther on were to be had for so much less. Thus the planter pushed the farmer on to a new frontier, or crowded him, if thriftless, back into the hills to join company with "poor whites." Excluded from the Northwest, the plantation spread over the Gulf states, and by the middle thirties the alluvial soils of this new South had become "black belts" in a double sense, since the slaves outnumbered the whites. On the south, at the close of the war, settlers were already pressing upon the Florida boundary and chafing under the Spanish control of the coast, which barred them from their natural outlets by way of the small rivers flowing into the Gulf. The American advance-guard passed the boundary of the United States during the twenties and settled in Texas under Mexican jurisdiction. Within our limits the extreme western frontier of agricultural settlement in this decade was on the Missouri River in the "Boone's Lick country," opposite the mouth of the Osage River. Americans had begun to settle in Missouri immediately after the purchase of Louisiana. Even before this came the aged Daniel Boone, seeking the "elbow room" no longer to be had in Kentucky or western Virginia. When Missouri Territory was organized in 1812, however, he already had twenty thousand "neighbors" along the river below his settlement, and on the west bank of the Mississippi. Missouri Territory gained population rapidly during the rush after 1815. Lying beyond the Old Northwest, it was open to the planter with his slaves. No ordinance such as barred him from Illinois operated here. Consequently, from Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, slaveholders went thither in numbers, in preference to the Gulf region. The tremendous shift of population in the early decades of the nineteenth century led to the division of old territories and the drawing of new boundaries with bewildering rapidity. Then as new states were admitted the political map was stabilized east of the Mississippi. Within a half-dozen years as many states were created. The appearance of Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), Maine (1820), and Missouri (1821), however, because statehood was granted when the population of each numbered only a few thousands, really marks only an early stage of the movement which was to convert the frontier settlements into populous commonwealths. These new states (except, of course, Maine) were the fruit chiefly of the Piedmontese migration, and were already members of the Union before the main movement of New Englanders and planters set in. THE FAR WEST Save for the migration into Texas beyond the bounds of the United States, the westward march of the agricultural frontier did not pass Missouri until after 1840. The admission of the new states named was followed by a process of filling in and compacting of population east of the Missouri River. While this was in progress the Far West became a field of great activity in the fur trade. The Americans infused new life into the trade which the Spanish and French had carried on in rather desultory manner from St. Louis, and soon made that town the outlet for the whole great Rocky Mountain area. William Clark was one of the organizers of the Missouri Fur Company (1809), the chief promoter of which, however, was the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa. A dozen years later (1821) the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was founded by General William H. Ashley. About the same time John Jacob Astor, a rich New York merchant, extended the operations of his American Fur Company from the Old Northwest to the transmississippi country. During the best days of the trade furs worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars were annually collected by the employes of these companies and brought to market through St. Louis. The industry was short-lived, and by 1840 the beaver trade was declining. For several decades more there was an immense traffic in buffalo hides, but by the middle of the century |