Page 24 - 2021-bfw-henretta-10e

226 PART 3 REVOLUTION AND REPUBLICAN CULTURE, 1754–1800

Posterity.” 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 specula-
tors 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.
SKILLS & PROCESSES Widespread landlessness — and in some cases, opposition to slavery — prompted
a new migration across the Ohio River into the future states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illi-
MAKING CONNECTIONS nois. In a free community, thought Peter Cartwright, a Methodist lay preacher from
How did the migration of southwestern Kentucky who moved to Illinois, “I would be entirely clear of the evil of
Americans in the Federal Period
help to establish new forms of slavery . . . [and] could raise my children to work where work was not thought a deg-
national culture and form new radation.” Yet land distribution in Ohio was almost exactly as unequal as in Kentucky:
ideas about national identity? 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 slaves 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 Ala-
bama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. “The Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence,”
a North Carolina planter remarked, “and has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens.”
Cotton was the key to this migratory surge. Around 1750, the demand for raw
wool and cotton increased dramatically as water-powered spinning jennies, weav-
ing mules, and other technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution boosted
textile production in England. South Carolina and Georgia planters began grow-
ing 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 Africans between 1776 and 1808,
when Congress cut off the Atlantic slave trade. The cotton boom financed the rapid
settlement of Mississippi and Alabama — in a single year, a government land office in
Huntsville, Alabama, sold $7 million of uncleared land — and 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 com-
munities 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, thou-
sands of farmers migrated to New York with their families. “The town of Herkimer,”
noted one traveler, “is entirely populated by families come from Connecticut.” 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.
In New York, as in Kentucky and Ohio, well-connected speculators snapped up
much of the best land, leasing farms to tenants for a fee. Imbued with the “home-
stead” ethic, many New England families preferred to buy farms. They signed con-
tracts with the Holland Land Company, a Dutch-owned syndicate of speculators that
allowed settlers to pay for their farms as they worked them, or moved west again in an
elusive search for land on easy terms.

Innovation on Eastern Farms The new farm economy in New York, Ohio, and
Kentucky forced major changes in eastern agriculture. Unable to compete with low-
er-priced western grains, farmers in New England switched to potatoes, which were
high yielding and nutritious. To make up for the labor of sons and daughters who
had moved inland, Middle Atlantic farmers bought more efficient farm equipment.
They replaced metal-tipped wooden plows with cast-iron models that dug deeper and
required a single yoke of oxen instead of two. Such changes in crop mix and technol-
ogy kept production high.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.

08_edwardsAPHS10e_28115_ch07_210_243_3pp.indd 226 15/09/20 8:56 PM