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268 PART 3 REVOLUTION AND REPUBLICAN CULTURE, 1754%u20131800Migration and the Changing Farm EconomyNative American resistance slowed the advance of white settlers but did not stop it. Nothing %u201cshort of a Chinese Wall, or a line of Troops,%u201d Washington declared, %u201cwill restrain . . . the Incroachment of Settlers, upon the Indian Territory.%u201d During the 1790s, two great streams of migrants moved out of the southern states, while a third flowed from New England.Southern Migrants One stream, composed primarily of white tenant farmers and struggling non-slave-owning families, flocked through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and Tennessee. %u201cBoundless settlements open a door for our citizens to run off and leave us,%u201d a worried Maryland landlord lamented, %u201cdepreciating all our landed property and disabling us from paying taxes.%u201d In fact, many migrants were fleeing from this planter-controlled society. They wanted more freedom and hoped to prosper by growing cotton and hemp, which were in great demand.Many settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee lacked ready cash to buy land. Like the North Carolina Regulators in the 1770s, poorer migrants claimed a customary right to occupy %u201cback waste vacant Lands%u201d sufficient %u201cto provide a subsistence to themselves and their Posterity.%u201d Virginia legislators, who administered the Kentucky Territory, had a more elitist vision. Although they allowed poor settlers to buy up to 1,400 acres of land at reduced prices, they sold or granted huge tracts of 100,000 acres to twenty-one groups of speculators and leading men. In 1792, this landed elite owned one-fourth of the state, while half the white men owned no land and lived as quasi-legal squatters or tenant farmers.Widespread landlessness%u2014and in some cases, opposition to slavery%u2014prompted a new migration across the Ohio River into the future states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In a free community, thought Peter Cartwright, a Methodist lay preacher from southwestern Kentucky who moved to Illinois, %u201cI would be entirely clear of the evil of slavery . . . [and] could raise my children to work where work was not thought a degradation.%u201d Yet land distribution in Ohio was almost exactly as unequal as in Kentucky: in 1810, a quarter of its real estate was owned by 1 percent of the population, while more than half of its white men were landless.Meanwhile, a second stream of southern planters and enslaved African Americans from the Carolinas moved along the coastal plain toward the Gulf of Mexico. Some set up new estates in the interior of Georgia and South Carolina, while others moved into the future states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. %u201cThe Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence,%u201d a North Carolina planter remarked, %u201cand has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens.%u201dCotton was the key to this migratory surge. Around 1750, the demand for raw wool and cotton increased dramatically as water-powered spinning jennies, weaving mules, and other technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution boosted textile production in England. South Carolina and Georgia planters began growing cotton, and American inventors, including Connecticut-born Eli Whitney, built machines (called gins) that efficiently extracted seeds from its strands. To grow more cotton, white planters imported about 115,000 enslaved Africans between 1776 and 1808, when Congress cut off the Atlantic slave trade. The cotton boom financed the rapid settlement of Mississippi and Alabama%u2014in a single year, a government land office in Huntsville, Alabama, sold $7 million of uncleared land%u2014and the two states entered the Union in 1817 and 1819, respectively.Exodus from New England As southerners moved across the Appalachians and along the Gulf Coast, a third stream of migrants flowed out of the overcrowded communities of New England. Previous generations of Massachusetts and Connecticut farm families had moved north and east, settling New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. Now New England farmers moved west. Seeking land for their children, thousands of farmers migrated to New York with their families. %u201cThe town of Herkimer,%u201d noted one traveler, %u201cis entirely populated by families come from Connecticut.%u201d By 1820, almost 800,000 New Englanders lived in a string of settlements stretching from Albany to Buffalo, and many others had traveled on to Ohio and Indiana. Soon, much of the Northwest Territory consisted of New England communities that had moved inland.exam tipCompare the frontier culture during the early years of the United States to the frontier culture of the colonial era in North America.skills & processesMAKING CONNECTIONSHow did the migration of Americans in the federal period help to establish new forms of national culture and form new ideas about national identity?%u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.