Indiana, and Illinois, into Missouri. By 1817, stagecoaches were running between Washington and Wheeling; by 1833 contractors had carried their work to Columbus, Ohio, and by 1852, to Vandalia, Illinois. Over this ballasted road mail and passenger coaches could go at high speed, and heavy freight wagons proceed in safety at a steady pace.

Canals and Steamboats. A second epoch in the economic union of the East and West was reached with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, offering an all-water route from New York City to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. Pennsylvania, alarmed by the advantages conferred on New York by this enterprise, began her system of canals and portages

from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, completing the last link in 1834. In the South, the Chesapeake and Ohio Company, chartered in 1825, was busy with a project to connect Georgetown and Cumberland when railways broke in upon the undertaking before it was half finished. About the same time, Ohio built a canal across the state, affording water communication between Lake Erie and the Ohio River through a rich wheat belt. Passengers could now travel by canal boat into the West with comparative ease and comfort, if not at a rapid speed, and the bulkiest of freight could be easily handled. Moreover, the rate charged for carrying goods was cut by the Erie Canal from $32 a ton per hundred miles to $1. New Orleans was destined to lose her primacy in the Mississippi Valley.

The diversion of traffic to Eastern markets was also stimulated

by steamboats which appeared on the Ohio about 1810, three years after Fulton had made his famous trip on the Hudson. It took twenty men to sail and row a five-ton scow up the river at a speed of from ten to twenty miles a day. In 1825, Timothy Flint traveled a hundred miles a day on the new steamer Grecian "against the whole weight of the Mississippi current." Three years later the round trip from Louisville to New Orleans was cut to eight days. Heavy produce that once had to float down to New Orleans could be carried upstream and sent to the East by way of the canal systems.

Thus the far country was brought near. The timid no longer hesitated at the thought of the perilous journey. All routes were crowded with Western immigrants. The forests fell before the ax like grain before the sickle. Clearings scattered through the woods spread out into a great mosaic of farms stretching from the Southern Appalachians to Lake Michigan. The national census of 1830 gave 937,000 inhabitants to Ohio; 343,000 to Indiana; 157,000 to Illinois; 687,000 to Kentucky; and 681,000 to Tennessee.

With the increase in population and the growth of agricul

ture came political influence. People who had once petitioned Congress now sent their own representatives. Men who had hitherto accepted without protests Presidents from the seaboard expressed a new spirit of dissent in 1824 by giving only three electoral votes for John Quincy Adams; and four years later they sent a son of the soil from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, to take Washington's chair as chief executive of the nation the first of a long line of Presidents from the Mississippi basin.

References

W. G. Brown, The Lower South in American History.

B. A. Hinsdale, The Old North West (2 vols.).

A. B. Hulbert, Great American Canals and The Cumberland Road.
T. Roosevelt, Thomas H. Benton.

P. J. Treat, The National Land System (1785-1820).

F. J. Turner, Rise of the New West (American Nation Series).

J. Winsor, The Westward Movement.

Questions

1. How did the West come to play a rôle in the Revolution? 2. What preparations were necessary to settlement?

3. Give the principal provisions of the Northwest Ordinance.

4. Explain how freehold land tenure happened to predominate in the West.

5. Who were the early settlers in the West? What routes did they take? How did they travel?

6. Explain the Eastern opposition to the admission of new Western states. Show how it was overcome.

7. Trace a connection between the economic system of the West and the spirit of the people.

8. Who were among the early friends of Western development? 9. Describe the difficulties of trade between the East and the West. 10. Show how trade was promoted.

Research Topics

Northwest Ordinance. Analysis of text in Macdonald, Documentary Source Book. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. V, pp. 5–57.

The West before the Revolution.

The West during the Revolution.

Roosevelt, Vol. I.

Roosevelt, Vols. II and III.

Tennessee. - Roosevelt, Vol. V, pp. 95–119 and Vol. VI, pp. 9-87.
The Cumberland Road. - A. B. Hulbert, The Cumberland Road.
Early Life in the Middle West.

United States, pp. 617-633; 636–641.

Callender, Economic History of the

Slavery in the Southwest. Callender, pp. 641-652.

Early Land Policy. - Callender, pp. 668-680.

Westward Movement of Peoples.

Roosevelt, Vol. IV, pp. 7–39.

Lists of books dealing with the early history of Western states are given in Hart, Channing, and Turner, Guide to the Study and Reading of American History (rev. ed.), pp. 62-89.

Kentucky. Roosevelt, Vol. IV, pp. 176–263.