census, 1790, to the eve of the Civil War, 1860, and deals with the
organization of our government and the extension of settlement westward
to the Pacific. Free land and a very high birthrate among native
Americans led to a great increase of the population, so that the white
inhabitants of the United States, about three millions and a quarter
in 1790, became twenty-seven millions and a half, in 1860, though
immigration during the seventy-year period was not over four and a
quarter million.
From 1790 to 1820, no official record of immigrant arrivals was kept.
Thousands certainly arrived during those thirty years, but it seems
probable that they were nearly all English and Scotch.
Just as the termination in 1790 of the preceding period was marked by
a racial loss, caused by the expulsion of the Loyalists, so this later
period was terminated by an internecine Civil War, costing the country
three-fourths of a million Nordic lives, counting killed and died of
wounds only. The descendants of those men who gave their lives for
their country on both sides would have filled up the West, instead of
its being largely populated by the immigrants we recklessly invited to
our shores.
During the period referred to (1790-1860), there was, as said, no heavy
immigration except from two sources, Ireland and Germany, and both of
these occurred in the later portion of the period.
The displacement of agriculture by sheep in Scotland at the beginning
of the nineteenth century dispossessed thousands of farmers who moved
to America, sometimes with the active assistance of their landlords.
The population of some districts, as Perthshire, Argyllshire, and
Inverness-shire, fell sharply, because the people, no longer able to
make a living, moved away. North America was the favorite destination.
Southern England experienced a similar movement. The price of
agricultural products, which had been forced up during the Napoleonic
wars, fell steadily for a long time. Farmers could not make a living.
The counties of Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, and Surrey were the chief
centers of emigration. These people also turned their faces toward
North America.
Ireland, too, was in perpetual ferment and the emigration from that
island was increased as the result of the abortive revolutionary
attempts of the United Irishmen in 1798 and 1803. After the leader of
the latter, Robert Emmet, was executed, his elder brother, Thomas A.
Emmet, came to New York, practised law, and within a decade became the
attorney-general of the state. The Emmets, like most others of these
Irish refugees, were Protestants in religion.
Later, in 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland, and soon after
the starving peasantry, many of them from the lower types of western
Ireland, swarmed over here. The women became domestic servants and the
men day laborers, doing the heavy work of ditch digging and railroad
building. They were Roman Catholic and that fact excited animosity in
many sections of the country. They were not welcome in the West when
they drifted there. It was not unusual to see on the frontier railroad
stations and in advertisements in New York newspapers, "No Irish need
apply." There was some violence and an American party was organized to
check their entrance into local politics, for which they showed great
aptitude.
Since then, these Irish have been forced upward in the social scale by
later arriving immigrants over whom they had the advantage of speaking
English. They became the nucleus in America of the present Roman
Catholic Church, which has spread rapidly in this country. The Irish
did not take to agriculture and have never shown much liking for the
larger industries.
The total number of Irish immigrants during the forties and fifties
amounted to more than a million and a half, and that first migration
has been followed by a continuous stream of southern Irish down to the
last few years when the quota restrictions went into effect.
[Illustration: ROMAN CATHOLICS
1930]
As soon as they secured a certain amount of wealth and rose in the
social scale, they established schools and colleges of their own, the
teachings and, indeed, the existence of which conflict with those of
the public-school system of the United States, and to that extent they
have impaired the unity of the nation. Some regiments of Irish fought
on the Northern side in the Civil War, but the draft riots of New York
were caused by the Irish who did not want to fight for the Union. In
addition to the shanty Irish there came over some middle-class families
of importance.
The second immigration of importance occurred a few years later when
a large number of Germans were forced over here by the failure of the
Revolution in Germany in 1848. These Germans were very different from
those who migrated to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Many of
them were from northern Germany and were Nordics, including individuals
of some culture and distinction. They settled in certain cities of
the West, notably in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Saint Louis. For the
most part, however, they took up public land and became hard-working
farmers. They did not in the mass improve the population already here
intellectually, racially, or physically, and they impaired our national
unity, at least for the time being, by the introduction of their own
language.
At the end of the period here considered there were in the United
States more than one and a quarter millions of German-born, of whom
about one-fourth were Roman Catholics. This church, which in 1790
controlled not one in a hundred of the population, could in 1860 count
upon one in every nine of the Whites.
Outside of the Irish and Germans, who were preponderantly Nordic, there
was not much immigration of importance. The census of 1860 enumerated
4,138,697 foreign-born persons out of a total of nearly 27,000,000
Whites. England, Scotland, and Canada accounted for most of those who
were neither Irish nor German. Thus at the end of this period the
racial unity of the United States was still virtually unimpaired.
The French in the old Northwest Territory were negligible in number,
amounting to but a few thousands. The number of Mexicans in Texas,
Arizona, and New Mexico when we took over those countries was but a few
thousand more. These Mexicans considered themselves Spanish; but as a
matter of fact, the veneer of religion, language, and culture was very
thin, and racially most of them were at least seven-eighths Indian. The
same condition prevailed in California in 1846; the number of Mexicans
being even smaller than in Texas.
* * * * *
Many of the original Colonial charters granted by the English kings
provided for a north and south boundary by latitude, but the western
boundary was often defined as the "South Sea," and not unnaturally
many of these boundaries overlapped. After the Revolution, the
original colonies were induced to cede to the Federal Government
their indefinite and conflicting claims to the western lands. This
general and important cession of territory had two results: it gave the
impoverished Federal Government lands which could be sold for its own
benefit, and it led to the establishment of communities which looked to
the Federal Government for everything they needed, which in itself was
a long step toward unity of government.
In 1787 the western boundaries of New York and Pennsylvania were fixed
as they are at present, and out of the country south of the Great
Lakes, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi was erected
the Northwest Territory under the special guardianship of the Federal
Government.
This "Northwest Territory" had been seized during the Revolution by
an extraordinary group of adventurers and frontiersmen under General
George Rogers Clark. Thereby the Thirteen Colonies were in physical
possession of these districts south of the Great Lakes when the Treaty
of Paris was signed in 1783. Without such actual possession of the
Old Northwest, it would have remained part of Canada, an outcome
which would have limited the growth of the United States westward or,
more probably, have led to another war. The reluctance of the British
authorities in charge of the outposts in this territory to surrender
their forts in accordance with the terms of the treaty, and their
alleged backing of the Indians, were among the causes underlying the
War of 1812.
As population increased, new States were created in succession out of
this territory--Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan
(1837), and Wisconsin (1848).
* * * * *
Ohio's first straggling settlers had pushed northwesterly across
the Ohio River during the Revolution, but the first real, permanent
settlement was by the New England Company which established Marietta
in 1788. This New England immigration, though soon swamped by that
from other States, played an important part in the organization of the
territory and in the shaping of its future policies.
Scarcely had the Massachusetts group, led by General Rufus Putnam,
taken possession of its vast grant around Marietta, when a new group
led by Judge J.C. Symmes of Kentucky occupied a grant of a million
acres between the Great and Little Miami Rivers, including the sites
of Cincinnati, Dayton, and many of the most important of the early
settlements of the territory.
Virginia had reserved a military district of more than four million
acres to reward its soldiers of the Revolution, and this quickly began
to be settled largely by veterans from Kentucky which was at that time,
it will be remembered, still a part of Virginia.
Connecticut on the other hand had stipulated for its own Western
Reserve of nearly 3,000,000 acres, extending in an oblong, 120 miles,
from the boundary of Pennsylvania along Lake Erie, and the settlement
of Cleveland marked its nucleus.
Thus Ohio, within a few years after the Revolution, started with four
different growing points. The Virginia element increased the most
rapidly, partly because of its proximity to Kentucky, partly because of
its easy access by the Ohio River, so that the English and Ulster Scots
of the southern part of the State soon dominated the whole.
A similar element was continually coming across the Pennsylvania
border from the Monongahela country, and before long the Pennsylvania
emigration to Ohio became the greatest from any one State, filling up
the central part which comprised the great wheat belt. Even as late as
the Mexican War, one-fourth of the members of the Ohio Legislature were
natives of Pennsylvania, exceeding the members born in any other State,
or in all the New England States combined, or in Ohio itself.
Through Kentucky came not merely Virginians but a steady stream of
Ulster Scots from North Carolina, many of whom, however, had previously
been Virginians. The southern parts of the State, therefore, took on
some of the complexion of the slave-holding States, while the northern
part was tinged by the culture of New England and the Central States,
many coming in from western New York, which from the present point of
view is to be regarded as merely an extension of New England.
Thus for a score of years the population of the States to the south and
east of Ohio, which, dammed back by hostile Indians, had been ready to
overflow for some time, poured into the new territory. Then the flood
slackened until after the close of the War of 1812, when it was renewed
with vigor. Men from all parts of the United States who had served
with the western and northern forces in the War of 1812 had seen the
beauties of the new country and determined to settle there as soon as
peace was declared and they could dispose of their holdings at home. So
far as New England was concerned this tendency was accentuated by two
remarkably cold winters in 1816 and 1817, which surpassed the memories
of the oldest inhabitants. General economic and social conditions were
favorable for a widespread movement of population. The northwestern
part of Ohio had been cleared of Indians and was then thrown open to
settlement.
This second great flood of immigration into Ohio was in general of
the same character as the first, bringing into the State from all
sides an almost purely Nordic population of British ancestry, except
for the small element of Pennsylvania Dutch who for a while kept much
to themselves, maintained their own customs and their own language,
and thus cut themselves off largely from the march of progress. Their
Alemannish dialect was rapidly becoming almost as far out of line with
the literary language of Germany as it was with the English language of
their adopted home.
Later Ohio received a quarter of a million of German and Irish
immigrants. But of the 2,339,511 inhabitants whom the State contained
in 1860, a million and a half were born in the State itself.
* * * * *
Indiana, a typical American State, owes nothing worth mentioning to the
original French population. In early days it must be considered little
more than an extension of Kentucky. Virginia had set aside a large
tract for rewarding the men of George Rogers Clark's expedition and
these were the original land agents, so to speak, for the territory.
But all along the border a frontier population drifted there across the
Ohio River. As late as 1850 there were twice as many Southern people
in Indiana as there were from the Middle States and New England put
together. A good share of these were from Kentucky, which means that
they or their parents were previously from Virginia or North Carolina.
That Indiana was in sympathy a Northern State bears testimony to the
fact that these migrants had little in common except original racial
stock with the older slave-holding population. The Ulster Scots were
the largest element, although there were also many Quakers from North
and South Carolina, some of whom were of Huguenot descent. It was this
element which made of Indiana a principal route of the "Underground
Railroad," as the system of smuggling runaway slaves out of the slave
States was called. But in the southern part of the State there was much
sympathy with the slaveholders.
The settlement of Indiana falls almost entirely in the nineteenth
century, the number of people there prior to 1800 being negligible and
confined for the most part to lands under the protection of the little
post of Vincennes. On the northerly side of the Ohio River, at the
Falls, the settlement of the tract of 149,000 acres, which Virginia had
conveyed in 1786 to General Clark and his soldiers, was well under way.
The rapid settlement of Indiana was a part of the great westward
movement beginning with the panic of 1819, and the hard times that
followed. The price of cotton was steadily declining in the South
and it was easy for the poorer farmer heavily in debt to sell out or
simply pack up and quit, moving on to free and richer land in a new
country. Many of the Ulster Scots in the South were hostile to slavery,
while others of them, strongly Jacksonian in politics, were opposed
to nullification and shared the reputed death-bed regret of the hero
of New Orleans that he had not hanged John C. Calhoun. South Carolina
therefore sent a large contingent of Ulster Scots to the new territory,
in addition to the general immigration which has already been mentioned.
The Southern stream was met in the old Northwest Territory by the
stream of New Englanders coming over the line of the Erie Canal after
crossing the Hudson at the great break in the highlands near Albany.
Many of the settlers of northern Indiana had tarried for a season in
Ohio and moved westward as they had a chance to harvest the unearned
increment by selling their farms at a profit and migrating to take up
cheaper land and start again.
Indiana missed the main flood of foreign immigration in the generation
before the Civil War. The Germans were going elsewhere because of
clannishness, while the Irish avoided Indiana because of its lack of
great cities. By the time the Scandinavian flood began to come in, land
values in Indiana were already high and the new settlers went farther
west and north.
Indiana, therefore, of the States in the Northwest Territory is the
most nearly Nordic in population and the most nearly American, and,
at the end of the period under consideration, it represented an
overwhelmingly native-born population originating, in not very unequal
parts, from the Northern and Southern States, respectively. Though
the foreign element was rapidly gaining ground, it had not begun
to make itself felt even as late as 1833 when northern Indiana was
a wilderness, while southern Indiana was already well peopled from
Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas.
The development of internal improvements together with the general
migration from Northern States to all points west brought a complete
change in the political complexion of the State. In 1836, alone, land
sales in Indiana amounted to 3,000,000 acres and in the decade from
1840 to 1850 the population of counties bordering the new Ohio canal
increased 400 per cent, while the State began to look to New York as an
outlet for its products rather than to New Orleans.
From 1820, the date of the founding of Indianapolis, to 1860, Indiana
had twice quadrupled her population and from almost purely American
stock. During these forty years, it is calculated that a million
people came to the Northwest from the slave States of the South. At
the outbreak of the Civil War, Indiana had a population of 1,350,000
of which only about one in eleven was foreign-born. More than half
of the aliens were from Germany, and Indiana seems to have attracted
particularly the Nordic element, since Prussia contributed the largest
quota. Ireland was represented by only 24,000 persons at that time and
like the smaller French and English groups, they were scattered through
the State and soon became lost in the general mass.
This distinctive character of Indiana, almost purely American,
Protestant, and Nordic in 1860, gives the key to much of its history
since then. As elsewhere the immediate surrounding States had
contributed the bulk of the population. The census returns showed that
the ten States constituting the birthplace of the largest number of
Hoosiers in that year were, in order of importance: Ohio, Kentucky,
Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland,
New Jersey, and Illinois. So far as the New England element was
represented, it had come almost wholly through other States.
* * * * *
Illinois, like Ohio, had attracted a few settlers before the
Revolution, mainly to the neighborhood of the half-dozen little French
trading posts. The French population of this district had never been
large, and when it was taken over by Great Britain in 1763, most of
the French inhabitants who could get away hastened to do so, either
returning to Canada or going down the river to Saint Louis or New
Orleans.
With the withdrawal of the little French garrisons only a few hundred
persons of French ancestry were left in the territory. These were of
two different origins. Part had come down from Canada and represented
the "Habitant" French, who were largely Alpine. The remainder had come
up the river from New Orleans and represented a more heterogeneous and
probably inferior group. Some of the Canadians brought their families;
but for the most part the French element was made up of single men who
formed loose alliances with Indian squaws. For these various reasons
the French influence on the subsequent population of the region is too
negligible to justify consideration.
The raid made by the Kentuckians under George Rogers Clark during the
Revolution had given the Americans a more detailed knowledge of this
region, and by 1800 several thousand of them had already drifted across
the border and started settlements. This immigration increased up to
the outbreak of Indian hostilities in 1811 followed by the War of
1812 which almost completely checked settlement along the old western
frontier.
After the declaration of peace and the opening up of land sales in 1814
and 1816, Illinois began to have a real boom. By this time the choicest
locations in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky had either been taken by
settlers or bought by speculators, so that the new arrival looking for
a bonanza turned to Illinois or Missouri.
Following the general rule of migration in the United States, which
was not broken until the gold rush to California in 1849 introduced
new conditions, the settlement of Illinois was mostly from the States
closest to it, and at the beginning was almost wholly from the South,
particularly from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Insignificant
little Shawneetown, on the Ohio River just below the mouth of the
Wabash, gave easy access to the lower end of Illinois--that "Egypt"
which is still a Southern Democratic stronghold. For a short time it
was even the seat of government.
In this population the presence of a sprinkling of Northerners from
Pennsylvania was resented and an occasional stray Yankee was scarcely
tolerated. The settlement of the northern part of the State by New
Englanders was made to a marked extent by colonies or organized
groups, and from the early thirties one reads continually of the
movement of caravans from all the New England States and western New
York. Here again the opening of the Erie Canal gave easy access to
northern Illinois by water. Prior to that time the lead mines in the
northwestern part of Illinois and the southwestern part of Wisconsin
had been the main attraction, and had been developed almost entirely by
the Southerners.
In general, it may be said that up to that time three-fourths of the
population of Illinois came from south of the Mason and Dixon line,
with Kentucky making the largest single contribution, although a small
foreign element was already arriving, mainly from the British Isles.
At the date of Statehood in 1818, Illinois may be said to have been
dominated by the Ulster Scots who had come in from the southern
Piedmont. These represented, on the whole, a class which for lack
of wealth and other reasons had not been slaveholders, and had no
particular sympathy with slavery, having found by personal experience
that the presence of slave labor was disadvantageous to a large part of
the white population. As a matter of fact, probably not more than one
Southern family in four ever owned a slave.
The population required of a new State for admission to the Union in
1818 was 40,000. By the beginning of the Civil War the population of
Illinois had increased to a million and three quarters. Obviously this
change in little more than a generation represented only in small
part the natural increase of the original settlers from Kentucky
and Virginia. So rapidly, indeed, did the forces of progress act in
Illinois that many of the old-timers packed up and moved on, as had
happened during the previous generation among their parents, and
Illinois in the following generation will be found strongly represented
in the early migration to California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado.
To show how little slave-holding sentiment there was in the early
Illinois population, in spite of its Southern origin, it is interesting
to note that most of the Illinois contingent in Kansas were Free-State
men whom the South regarded as enemies to its cause.
For every one of the old-timers who moved farther west, a dozen
Yankees arrived along with many Pennsylvanians, while the Southern
immigration almost entirely stopped, having been diverted to Texas or
to territories beyond the Mississippi.