The number of these
would have been larger had there been less rigid restrictions
upon slaveholding. It was rather, however, the poorer whites--the
more democratic, non-slaveholding Southern element--that formed
the bulk of the earlier settlers north of the Ohio.
There was much westward migration from New England before the War
of 1812, but only a small share of it reached the Ohio country,
and practically none went beyond the Western Reserve. The common
goal was western New York. Here again there was some emigration
of the well-to-do and influential. But, as in the South, the
people who moved were mainly those who were having difficulty in
making ends meet and who could see no way of bettering their
condition in their old homes. The back country of Maine, New
Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts was filled with
people of this sort--poor, discontented, restless, without
political influence, and needing only the incentive of cheap
lands in the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to
the stony hillsides of New England.
After 1815 New England emigration rose to astonishing
proportions, and an increasing number of the homeseekers passed--
directly or after a sojourn in the Lower Lake country of New
York--into the Northwest.
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