A Brief History of the United States

by John Bach McMaster

[Illustration: BREAKING FLAX.]

FIVE NEW STATES.—The first effect of the emigration to the West was such an increase of population there that five new states were admitted in five years. They were Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), Missouri (1821). As Louisiana (1812) and Maine (1820) had also been admitted by 1821, the Union then included twenty-four states (map, p. 279).

POWER OF THE WEST.—A second result of this building of the West was an increase in its political importance. The West in 1815 sent to Congress 8 senators and 28 members of the House; after 1822 it sent 18 senators out of 48, and 47 members of the House out of 213.

[Illustration: TRADING WITH A RIVER MERCHANT.]

TRADE OF THE WEST.—A third result was a straggle for the trade of the West. Favored by the river system, the farmers of the West were able to float their produce, on raft and flatboat, to New Orleans. Before the introduction of the steamboat, navigation up the Mississippi was all but impossible. Flatboats, rafts, barges, broadhorns, with their contents, were therefore sold at New Orleans, and the money brought back to Pittsburg or Wheeling and there used to buy the manufactures sent from the Eastern states. But now a score of steamboats went down and up the Mississippi and the Ohio, stopping at Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Natchez, and a host of smaller towns, loaded with goods obtained at Pittsburg and New Orleans. [13] Commercially the West was independent of the East. The Western trade of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore was seriously threatened.

THE ERIE CANAL.—So valuable was this trade, and so important to the East, that New York in 1817 began the construction of the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, and finished it in 1825. [14] The result, as we shall see in a later chapter, was far-reaching.

SLAVERY.—A fourth result of the rush to the West was the rise of the question of slavery beyond the Mississippi.

Before the adoption of the Constitution, as we have seen, slavery was forbidden or was in course of abolition in the five New England states, in Pennsylvania, and in the Northwest Territory. Since the adoption of the Constitution gradual abolition laws had been adopted in New York (1799) and in New Jersey (1804). [15] Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama came into the Union as slave-holding states; and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois (besides Vermont) as free states. So in 1819 the dividing line between the eleven free and the eleven slave states was the south boundary line of Pennsylvania (p. 81) and the Ohio River.

SLAVERY BEYOND THE MISSISSIPPI.—By 1819 so many people had crossed the Mississippi and settled on the west bank and up the Missouri that Congress was asked to make a new territory to be called Arkansas and a new state to be named Missouri.

Whether the new state was to be slave or free was not stated, but the Missourians owned slaves and a settlement of this matter was important for two reasons: (1) there were then eleven slave and eleven free states, and the admission of Missouri would upset this balance in the Senate; (2) her entrance into the Union would probably settle the policy as to slavery in the remainder of the great Louisiana Purchase. The South therefore insisted that Missouri should be a slave-holding state, and the Senate voted to admit her as such. The North insisted that slavery should be abolished in Missouri, and the House of Representatives voted to admit her as a free state. As neither would yield, the question went over to the next session of Congress.