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.