Part 12

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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.

The people who left the slave-holding States in the decade prior to the Civil War were largely seeking free soil themselves. This movement of some of the best Nordic stock out of the South just before and at the beginning of the Civil War has not been given as much importance as it deserves. It was a factor in the weakening of the South and the strengthening of the North. While slavery was a curse in the opinion of many an owner of a great plantation, he was caught in the system and felt that he could not get away. The poor man, on the other hand, found conditions less and less to his liking and many of the more intelligent decided to get out of a country where they were obliged to compete with Negro slaves and were looked down upon by their white neighbors. In this way the lands along the Illinois Central Railway became a lode-stone for ambitious and dissatisfied farmers from Tennessee, Alabama, and even from Georgia. With the outbreak of hostilities this trickle became temporarily a torrent as political refugees who did not care to remain in a slave-holding republic at war with the American Union began to seek freer air.

The railroads developed a new specialty in transporting whole families with their furniture and agricultural implements to points in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, while steamers made their way up the Mississippi crowded with refugees and great numbers of Missourians crossed the river to Illinois with all their worldly goods. Many of the latter returned home after Missouri was cleared of secession, but their place was taken by new streams of Southerners released by the victories of Union armies and coming to join friends and relatives in southern and central Illinois.

The decline of leadership in the South after the war was not due entirely to the loss of its men on the battle-field. Although this was by far the principal factor, another important one was the flight from the South of many of those who were not in sympathy with the fire-eating politicians who had forced secession upon often unwilling communities.

Before this time, however, the streams of foreign-born which poured into the Mississippi Valley had already begun to influence the composition of the population of Illinois, so that even in 1850 one in four was of alien birth. The largest element was German, who formed farming communities, mainly in the northern and central part of the State. By 1860 there were 130,000 of them in Illinois, together with others who had also come from Pennsylvania.

Ireland sent the group of second importance, and the great internal improvements in this period were largely the product of their labor. As elsewhere the Irish showed little inclination for farming, which had proved so ruinous to them in Ireland, and they made a restless floating population in the large cities. In 1860 they represented four times as large a proportion of the population of Chicago as they did of the State as a whole.

The State attracted a large English immigration. The Illinois Central Railroad had been built to a considerable extent with English capital, and the stockholders saw a chance to increase the value of their shares by promoting emigration to the lands owned by the company, so that by 1860 there were 41,000 English-born in the State.

Another large element of English descent, which had come into the State in an extraordinary way, had already left. This was the group of Mormon converts who were brought over from 1840 onward. By 1844 it was estimated that of the 16,000 Mormon arrivals, 10,000 were English. Most of these went west to Utah later, or were scattered within a few years.

The last important Nordic element in the State was that of the Scandinavians who had only begun to come before the Civil War, at which time there were little more than 10,000 of them in the State as against 87,000 Irish.

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Michigan, owing to its proximity to Canada, and the importance of Detroit as a headquarters, had a distinct French atmosphere in its early days. Unlike those in some of the more distant settlements, the French inhabitants at Detroit did not intermarry frequently with the Indians, and they represent therefore a relatively pure French Canadian stock. American immigration was slow, and not until 1805 did the inhabitants become numerous enough to warrant a separate territory. As late as the beginning of the War of 1812 four-fifths of the 5000 people in Michigan were French. In 1817 the first steamboat appeared on the waters of Lake Erie and the Erie Canal was begun, and from that time the Americanization of the territory was rapid.

By 1830 a hundred ships, both steam and sail, were on the Lakes, and a daily line ran between Buffalo and Detroit. In 1836 when the State Constitution was adopted the population was nearly 100,000, mainly from New England and its extension in western New York. The Empire State can very definitely be called the parent of Michigan.

Many of the New England farmers who had bought farms from the great land companies in western New York found themselves unable or unwilling to complete their payments and sold their equities for enough to buy government land in Michigan and move their families, while from the rocky hills of Vermont a steady stream came without any intervening stop. By this time many of the French Canadians had moved out, and of eighty-nine names signed to the Constitution of 1835, not more than three can be identified as French.

The tide of alien immigration at this period was late in reaching Michigan. A group not found elsewhere was that of Dutchmen who came like some of the earlier settlers, seeking religious tolerance and freedom. The town of Holland has been a centre for them since 1847. Of the 749,113 inhabitants of the State in 1860, one-fifth were foreign-born, divided not unequally between English, Irish, Germans, and mixed Canadians.

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Wisconsin's first settlement was at the lead mines of the southwestern part and attracted largely Ulster Scots from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A little later these were reinforced by another Nordic group of Englishmen from Cornwall who formed an important element in that region.

The second migration scattered agricultural communities throughout the southeastern part of Wisconsin along the lake shore. This immigration was almost wholly from the New England States and the New England part of New York State, and was accomplished roughly in the years 1835 to 1850. By 1847 when Statehood was achieved the territory had a population of nearly 250,000 and was virtually a New England colony.

Of the seventy-six men who composed the second Constitutional Convention, one-third came from New York, one-third from New England, and the rest were a scattering.

During the decade which ended with the Federal Census of 1850, the growth of the State had been nearly 900 per cent, a record rarely exceeded in America. This extraordinary surge was due largely to the sudden arrival of a foreign element which has ever since made Wisconsin a State apart from all the others. Even as early as 1850 one-third of the population was actually foreign-born. Of the foreign-born who came to the State during the territorial period, the British Isles contributed about one-half and foreign-language groups the other half. The English-speaking immigrants soon blended with the native population, with the exception of the Roman Catholic Irish who were less easily assimilated. In the decade before the Civil War there was a stream of Belgian immigrants amounting to at least 15,000. Some hundreds of Russians also came in and the Scandinavians had begun to arrive, although they did not play an important part until after the Civil War. Danes and Norwegians were beginning to come in some numbers but few Swedes as yet.

The great immigration of this period was the German, which introduced another partly Alpine element into the overwhelmingly Nordic population of the United States. These had begun to come after 1830, when the Revolution in France had stirred up similar, but less successful, political upheavals in the parts of South Germany adjoining France. Many of the politically discontented decided to leave the country or were obliged to do so, and they found in Wisconsin conditions particularly to their liking. In the first place the State offered a variety of climate and soil that was not dissimilar to that in which they were brought up. In the second place land was cheap and good and there was much forest land for which the Germans showed a notable preference. Not only was the possession of timber an asset, but it was to the German immigrant a mark of social status. Forests had largely disappeared in Germany, except on the great estates of the nobility. Hence, to own a piece of forest land was a mark of superiority. Only the few could afford the forest land in Germany but in Wisconsin every small farmer could feel himself as good as the Duke or Prince whose yoke he had renounced. A third important attraction after Statehood was a provision that the alien could vote after only one year's residence. This gave the Germans a political importance without delay which they lost no time in using.

German settlement in the United States follows a belt beginning with Pennsylvania and running due west through Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. This was partly due to an avoidance of the Southern States with whose products they were not familiar and with whose land system and slave labor they were not sympathetic. Being in this belt Wisconsin immediately took and retained such a prominence that patriots from the "Fatherland" seriously urged that it become a genuine German colony.

The Pennsylvania Dutch had already shown how little disposed the German-speaking peoples were to become citizens of a new country with a whole heart, and the new tide of immigration followed this example. They attacked the public-school system from the beginning and insisted on having their own schools and on having their children taught German in the American schools. They kept their own social organization and even went so far as to get the State laws published in the German language in Indiana in 1858. This tendency toward hyphenation has made the Germans a less valuable element in the American population up to the present time than they should have been.

The early German immigration to Wisconsin was on the whole from southern and central Germany, and was pre-dominantly Alpine in race and Roman Catholic in religion. Statehood in Wisconsin coincided with the unsuccessful Revolution of 1848 in Germany which started the real flood of German immigration that reached its maximum numbers in 1854, and continued with noticeable strength for more than a generation longer.

The principal Nordic emigration in the '40s was from Pomerania and Brandenburg, and many of the South Germans, while largely Alpine, were Protestants rather than Catholics. In 1863, just after the end of the period here considered, the church authorities reported that Wisconsin contained 225,000 German Lutherans as against 105,000 German Catholics. After that the Germans pressed more and more into the northern and central regions of the State.

Wisconsin then at the end of the period here considered (1860) had probably the largest non-Nordic population of any of the American States, although even here the Nordics were in a great majority. With one-third of its population foreign-born, it was surpassed in this respect only by California.

IX

THE MOUNTAINEERS CONQUER THE SOUTHWEST

Meanwhile the States of the lower Mississippi Valley were coming into existence at a rapid rate.

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Alabama had no American settlement until after the Revolution, save for the sporadic appearance of adventurers or traders. But in 1798, when the Mississippi territory was formed, including the present State of Alabama, there was already a movement of settlers from the adjoining States on the east and north, and this continued rapidly until checked by the war with the Creek Indians in 1813 and 1814. This war advertised the territory. Its termination threw the land open to settlement, and more than 100,000 people located in Alabama within five years. The slight French and Spanish element in Mobile and two or three other places was soon reduced to insignificant proportions.

The State was settled either by those who came down some of the rivers of that region, particularly from Tennessee, or by those who came through Georgia, stopping long enough at the land office in Milledgeville (then the State capital) to make the necessary arrangements for acquiring title to real estate. An unimproved but passable trail ran thence through Montgomery to Natchez, and over this "Three Notch Road" (so-called from the blaze which marked it) a stream of settlers from the Atlantic seaboard States passed into the broad belt of rich blackland which quickly made Alabama and Mississippi the heart of the Cotton Kingdom. Alabama is, for the most part, the offspring of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, and therefore represents almost entirely Scotch and English blood. Its foreign-born population was negligible in 1860, amounting to little more than 12,000, almost half of whom were Irish, in a total of virtually a million.

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Mississippi: As in most others of this group of States, the supposed influence of the earlier French and Spanish settlements is more sentimental than real. American settlers began to filter in after 1763, some coming even from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. A few Loyalists drifted down to the Mississippi country during the Revolution, joining the British who were attached to the district at that time in military or administrative capacities. One of the elements of this Loyalist immigration consisted of Scotch Highlanders from North Carolina.

The census of 1850 furnished the first opportunity to ascertain the origin of the population. The main immigration naturally was from other Southern States which contributed 145,000 against 5000 from the Northern States. In the same year 18,000 natives of Mississippi were residing in other Southern States, principally in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee.

At the census ten years later the Mississippi natives, then located in other Southern States, had almost doubled in number. The enumeration gives an interesting picture of the way in which population was flowing backward and forward between adjoining States at that time as it has in almost every other period in American history.

Since the population of Mississippi before the Civil War was almost identical in composition with the population of the other Mississippi Valley slave States, most of which owed their inhabitants originally to Virginia and subsequently to the States which Virginia had colonized, it was not surprising that these people found it easy to move from one part of this region to another. Of nearly 800,000 population at the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign-born, still mainly Irish, constituted only one in a hundred. But nearly half of the population of the State was colored, and thus no element of racial strength. In this respect Mississippi's record was surpassed only by Georgia and South Carolina. This latter State was the only one in which Negroes actually outnumbered Whites at that time. Other Southern States later reached the same unenviable situation, and it continued in South Carolina until after the shift of Negro population which followed the World War.

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Louisiana at the time of the Purchase in 1803 presented among its 50,000 residents a more varied group than could be found in any other American State. The foundation of this population was French, the Spanish element never having been important. These French seem to have represented a much more heterogeneous lot than did the early French-Canadians. One colonization scheme after another had been launched in Paris, and settlers had been recruited by all sorts of means, many of them of more than doubtful merit.

Here, however, as in other colonies, it must be remembered that the final population represented not those who arrived, but those who both survived and left posterity. This fact has too often been disregarded in the accounts of the origins of the American population. If France shipped prostitutes to New Orleans to provide wives for its soldiers, nevertheless this is now of importance only in so far as such persons left descendants. In one case, of which the details exist, forty-four girls were sent out from France in 1722. They all married, but only one left offspring.

Another element in the population was the Acadian refugees, who, uprooted by the New England militia in 1758, were driven to almost every part of the colonies. Some made their way to Louisiana, as Longfellow has described, though drawing a very erroneous picture, in _Evangeline_. Others were scattered through Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, in fact on almost every part of the Atlantic coast. The total number of persons expelled from Nova Scotia at this time probably did not exceed 6000, and many of these certainly died from hardships. In any case only a minority was directed to Louisiana, so that the original settlement of Acadians must represent a very small part of the population. The so-called "Cajan" population of some of the southern parishes of Louisiana is, at the present time, largely of other origins, chiefly Negro.

Another group of French refugees came from Haiti by way of Cuba after 1800, when the Negro uprising there drove out the Whites. Many of these were persons of good quality but as many as could do so went elsewhere after peace returned.

Still another source of population was the notorious Mississippi Bubble sponsored by the Scotchman John Law about 1717. This was the period at which the Germans from the Palatine and adjacent regions were emigrating in large numbers, as has been previously set forth in detail, and 10,000 or more of them were persuaded to go to Louisiana. According to accepted accounts, not more than 2000 of these Alpines actually arrived, and when the bubble burst, they settled along the Mississippi above Baton Rouge in a region which is still known as the German Coast.

An ill-natured English traveller, John Davis, visiting Louisiana in the year before the Purchase of 1803, has left the following picture of these two elements as they appeared to him: