was counterbalanced in the new states we have formed, by their being peopled wholly from the older ones, and community of language, manners, interest, and ties, thereby preserved. This is not the case with part of Louisiana and Florida...."

Long conceded that the eastern portion of the Missouri Territory was habitable and described so much of it as he observed along the river banks as he ascended. The census of 1810 had found 20,845 inhabitants in the territory; by 1820 the number had grown to 66,586 in the reduced Missouri, and 14,273 in Arkansas Territory. Most of the white inhabitants in both territories lived close to the great rivers. Behind St. Louis the settlements were pushing up the Missouri, and Long found the westernmost at Franklin, halfway between the mouth of the Kansas and that of the Missouri. About 1827 Franklin was washed away by the river, but in 1819 it was something over two years old and contained one hundred and twenty houses. There was here a weekly Missouri Intelligencer and Boone's Lick Advertiser that made its bow to the public on April 23, 1819, a few days before Long passed by. There were two brick houses among the one hundred and twenty, but the only building that had two stories was the jail. No church was mentioned, but there were four taverns and two billiard rooms.

Even before Long ascended the Missouri River, or made his discouraging report upon the future of the Far West, the people around St. Louis had begun to talk of statehood, as others were talking in the four other western territories that were admitted before 1820. The fact that there were under sixty thousand inhabitants when the talk began was of no importance, since Congress had the power to determine the suitability of the territory to become a State. There was no good reason for failing to admit Missouri that would not have been equally good if urged against Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, or Alabama; and there was no disposition to exclude the region.

There were memorials before Congress, praying for the admission of Missouri in 1817-1818, and they were reinforced in 1818-1819 by formal appeal from the assembly of the territory. The measure for the creation of Arkansas Territory that passed March 2, 1819, was accompanied by another enabling Missouri

Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missouri's Struggle for Statehood (1916), is detailed, well-informed, and judicious. There is a good picture of “Missouri in 1820," by Jonas Viles, in Missouri Historical Review, 1920.

to form a constitution. But the latter was blocked on February 13, when a New York representative, Tallmadge by name, offered an amendment forbidding the further existence of slavery in Missouri. The superior growth of the free States had already given them more than half the total population in the United States, and accordingly a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. The Tallmadge amendment was accepted in the House; the Senate struck it out, and Missouri failed to be enabled at this session.

Between the adjournment of Congress in March, 1819, and its reassembling in December, the march of settlers into the Missouri Valley continued, and the determination of southern congressmen not to permit the exclusion of slavery from Missouri grew fixed. The Senate was evenly balanced. Missouri would turn it one way or another. And when Maine appeared on the program for 1819-1820 demanding admission as a free State, it was unthinkable for the South to surrender its hold on Missouri. Good observers were reporting that the Missouri settlers were bringing with them more slaves than had gone north of the Ohio River, and the temper of Missouri itself was in favor of slave labor. The District of Maine was not one of the territories of the United States, and never had been one. It was instead a detached part of Massachusetts and partook of statehood already, having its share of representatives in the Massachusetts legislature and in the House of Representatives, under the Massachusetts apportionment laws. It had long indulged in talk of separate statehood and had grown much with the extension of settlement after the English war. Its constitutional convention met in October, 1819, and framed a document which the people promptly ratified. Massachusetts gave her consent to the separation, so that Congress had only to declare Maine to be a State. But the southern senators were now in earnest about Missouri, and Maine was accordingly paired with the former State, and threatened with exclusion unless Missouri came in slave.

The great debate in Congress in February, 1820, was the first formal display of the new sectionalism brought about by the renaissance of slavery. The virtues and defects of slavery as a system were brought in question, but more discussion was given to the power of Congress to place conditions upon the admission of a State, as Tallmadge desired to do, and to the rights of slave-holding citizens to a free and full use of the territory of the United States. Henry Clay, who was opposed to any re

striction upon Missouri, gave his support to the compromise with which the deadlock between Senate and House was broken. Maine was admitted, by an act of March 3, 1820, effective March 15. Missouri was authorized to frame such a constitution as she desired, by act of March 6. And it was further provided, as a concession to the northern opinion that yielded regarding Missouri, that there should be no slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase, north of Arkansas Territory (or the latitude of 36° 30' ). There is still some doubt as to who won by this compromise. It is certain, however, that slavery could not have been forced into any additional territory north or west of Missouri, and also that the slave-holder gained a right to enjoy slavery in all of the public domain in which it could be made to flourish.

Missouri remained outside the Union for seventeen months longer, not being admitted until August 10, 1821. The reason for the unusual delay is to be found in the procedure of the constitutional convention that began its sessions June 12, 1820. This body gloated too much over the southern victory and put into the constitution provisions excluding free negroes from Missouri, and restricting the power of the legislature to emancipate the slaves. The opponents of the compromise were so enraged at this that the act to admit Missouri under the new constitution could not pass the House of Representatives, and the debate over the status of slavery broke out anew in 1821. A committee of thirteen, presided over by Clay himself, failed to harmonize the conflict; a second grand committee of twentythree brought forth a proviso that nothing in the Missouri constitution should ever be construed as denying to a citizen of any State any of the privileges and immunities to which he might be entitled under the Constitution of the United States; and that the Missouri legislature must assent to this. In this form the final phase of the Missouri Compromise became a law; and in accordance with its provisions Missouri came into the Union in August.

With the admission of Missouri the great migration came to an end so far as new States were concerned, and the heavy shift of population subsided for another ten years. The United States had gained six new States in the process and was now confronted with a period of getting used to its new dimensions. The economics of its growth and the politics of its reactions are uppermost until 1829.

CHAPTER XXV

PUBLIC LAND REFORM

THE creation of new States along the unsettled border is an excellent index to the shifts of population. The fact that six such commonwealths were added to the United States in the six years beginning with 1816, would of itself establish that period as one of marked migration. But even better than the States as an index are the figures that show the sales of public lands by the United States, for these figures measure not only the opening of new settlements, but the extent to which help had been found to finance the settlement.

In the first fifteen years of the public land system, that terminated with the passage of the Harrison Land Act in 1800, the total sales from the public domain were 1,484,047 acres. This total includes the operations under the three private sales to the Ohio Associates, Symmes, and the State of Pennsylvania, as well as under the law of 1796. The Harrison Act brought the land office to the buyer, opening at the start four local offices in the Eastern Division of the Northwest Territory. From year to year these offices were closed, shifted, or increased in number, in order to follow the business. Before the Harrison Act was revised in 1820, there were or had been in operation fourteen such offices in Ohio, four in Indiana, three in Illinois, and one in Michigan. Outside the Old Northwest, in the same period, there were three in Alabama, three in Mississippi, four in Louisiana, and two in Missouri.

The distribution of these offices indicates the regions where government sales were most numerous; the annual sales reveal the flow of occupation. But until after the beginning of the War of 1812 the volume of business showed no startling changes. Until this date the business of the land sales was managed in a bureau of the Treasury Department; on April 25, 1812, this was reorganized as a General Land Office, under Edward Tiffin of Ohio as Commissioner. After this date the business increased rapidly, the figures in millions of acres running as follows:

It is not to be supposed that the figures of sales of public land give a complete measure of the new settlement. Much of the land thus bought was held by speculators and was not cleared or farmed until these owners could find purchasers. There was still much land on the market from earlier grants, in which the emigrants could buy tracts. There were school lands for sale in most of the States. And in Kentucky and Tennessee, where there was no public domain, there was an abundance of private land for sale. No general study has yet been made to show how private land titles originated for any large tract along the frontier. The Wisconsin "Domesday Book," now under way, will show it for a single State; but for the present there is no better indication of the speed with which all lands were being used than the fairly accurate figures for the government-owned part of it. By 1820, according to Donaldson, the government had sold 19,399,158 acres; but nearly a third of this was beyond the power of the purchaser to pay for, and was eventually turned back into the public domain, to be sold again. The defects in the land law that Harrison had promoted as a reform were grievous and notorious before it had been in operation for ten years.

The minimum cost of making a farm under the Harrison Act cannot have been much different from that of making it on land purchased otherwise. This law provided for sale first at public auction, and then at private sale at two dollars an acre. The better lands were often bid up at the auctions to fancy prices, but Donaldson shows that the apparent sales of over nineteen million acres were for a total of only forty-seven million dollars. After the unpaid-for lands were surrendered, the United States received twenty-eight million dollars for thirteen million acres. The actual receipts averaged so nearly the minimum of two dollars an acre that it is clear that this price was not too low for unimproved land on the average frontier.

Under the Harrison Act the minimum amount sold to one buyer was half a section, or three hundred and twenty acres. In 1804 this was lessened to the familiar quarter section of one hundred and sixty acres, which was quite as much as the ordinary