Population and Growth

The census a year later revealed a young, rural and growing country.  The country, earlier the colonies, had looked much like this for more than a hundred years — young, rural, growing — and was to continue to look like this throughout the Madison Presidency.  In 1810, the median age of the White population was sixteen years, and 94% of the population was rural.  The population had grown, primarily by reproduction, adding almost two million people since the previous census in 1800.  Madison would leave office in 1817 and the next census would be three years later in 1820.  The median age of the White population would be 16.5, of the Black population 17.2.  Ninety-three per cent of the population would be rural (Bogue, pages 44, 110).  The population would have grown by another 2.4 million despite the disruptions of the War of 1812.

In 1820, the White population remained overwhelmingly British in origin, and immigration was still making only a very modest contribution to growth.  Systematic collection of data on immigration began in 1820.  For the first five years — 1820-1824 — annual immigration never reached 10,000 (Bogue, Table 7-14A, page 352) in a country of 10 million people which was adding hundreds of thousands per year.  The immigrant streams that were to diversify the nation were a thing of the future.  In 1820, there were 30 immigrants from Italy, five from Poland, five from all of Asia, and one from Mexico.

Expansion

What had changed, however, was the scale, power, and self-confidence of the young nation.  In 1670 there had been little more than a 100 thousand colonists in a narrow strip along the Atlantic, fearful of the French and Native Americans and dependent upon England for their survival.  Now in 1810, there were more than seven million Americans, spread half-way across the continent, and claiming land to the Pacific  (see map).  There were now three states west of the Appalachians: Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio.  What used to be the Northwest was becoming Midwest and divided into the state of Ohio (1803) and three territories. Indiana will become the 19th state in 1816; Illinois the 21st in 1818.  The Mississippi Territory was what is left of the Southwest Territory and it will eventually provide the major portions of the states of Mississippi (the 20th in 1817) and Alabama (the 22nd in 1819).  The New Orleans Territory was part of the Louisiana purchase and will eventually form the core of Louisiana which becomes the 18th state in 1812.  The rest of the uncontested portion of the Louisiana purchase is in dark green. The far Northwest is contested between the U.S. and England. Spain holds Florida and Texas and the far southwest.  Spain and the U.S. contest the a small portion of the Gulf Coast on both sides of Louisiana.

The 1810 census reports almost one million people in the states and territories west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River.  Kentucky, with more than 400 thousand people, is the sixth largest state. This figure does not include Native Americans who were not counted in the census.  There are another 100,000 people west of the Mississippi, three-fourths of them in the New Orleans Territory.

A settlement map of 1820 reveals the extent of White American settlement three years after James Madison stepped down from office and three years into James Monroe's first term (see map). White settlers are yet to fully occupy the area east to the Mississippi.  Nonetheless, settlement flows along the river valleys taking advantage of the Mississippi and its tributaries to push ever further west beyond the Mississippi.

Implications for Native Americans

Again, the implications for the Native Americans were ominous.  Tecumseh was admired even by his adversaries, and the War of 1812 provided the Native Americans an ally in the British.  Nonetheless, seven million Americans growing by a third every ten years and with their gaze on the Pacific were too great a force to be stopped.  After initial victories, Tecumseh was to die covering the retreat of his British allies in the Battle of the Thames in 1813.  The British reconciled themselves to the inevitable at the end of the War of 1812 and abandoned their allies one more time.

Transportation

Efforts to provide transportation links between the Valley of the Ohio and the East Coast continued.  In 1805, the U.S. Senate had recommended the National Road lead from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Ohio River, and construction began in 1811 during Madison's first term.  Plans called for a genuine road, not simply a track through the forest.  The right of way was to be 66 feet wide and the roadway twenty feet wide.  It was to be paved with "stone, earth, or gravel or a combination…"   Progress was slow and the first section, 113 miles to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), was not completed for another seven years, in James Monroe's first term.

Canals, however, were preferred to either roads or river improvements, and plans for canals were also underway.  A canal inland from Washington paralleling the Potomac stalled, however, and construction did not begin until July 4, 1928.  The ambitiously named Chesapeake and Ohio (C&0) Canal never reached the Ohio.  Twenty-two years later it reached Cumberland, Maryland, linking with the National Road, and went no further (view Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park website) It would remain in commercial operation until 1924, but it had been overtaken by a new mode of transportation.  The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would achieve the goal implied by its name and link Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio.

Plans for another canal moved faster.  In New York, the valleys of the Hudson River and its tributary, the Mohawk, also reached far inland splitting the mountains (see map). The long navigable stretches had already made New York the fastest growing state. These river valleys were too far north to link with the Ohio, but Lake Erie could be reached by a 363 mile canal from the Hudson through the Mohawk Valley.  Jefferson, approached for federal assistance near the end of his administration, rejected the proposal out-of-hand.  There were no philosophical constraints on state action, however.  Following the War of 1812, New York governor DeWitt Clinton convinced the legislature of the commercial value of a link between the Midwest and the port of New York.  Construction began in 1817, funded by New York State. Completed in 1825, the canal proved its worth. Freight was moved over the canal at one tenth of the cost of road transport  (view University of Rochester, Department of History site for Erie Canal Chronology and Bibliography).

Transportation on the rivers was accelerated by the introduction of the steamboat. Robert Fulton of New York and John Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersery, had built operating steamboats in the early 1800s.  Fulton in partnership with Robert Livingston of New York had several steamboats operating on the Hudson by the end of the War of 1812.  They had others operating on the Raritan between New York City and New Brunswick, New Jersey, and one on the lower Mississippi.  Livingston had a state granted monopoly for operation in New York; thus Stevens operated his steamboat on the Deleware between Philadelphia and Trenton. (Chamberlain, pages 71-73.)

Sectional Differences

In 1810, the sectional lines that will eventually lead to the Civil War are hardening.  Slavery had virtually disappeared from New England and Pennsylvania.  It has never been allowed in the Northwest Territory.  The deep South was going the other way. Eli Whitney's cotton gin was making cotton, and thus slavery, profitable.  The total U.S production of cotton in 1791 had been 400 bales.  In 1810 it was 178,000 bales (Wright, page 195.)  In South Carolina, which will lead the Southern states into the war, the White percent of the population had increased slightly from 1790 to 1800, but from 1800 to 1810 it dropped a full five percentage points to less than 52%.  By 1820, Whites would be the minority in South Carolina. With minority status would come fear, a hardening of attitudes and ever more repressive practices.

At the same time, the North is growing faster.  In 1810, the five largest states with respect to free population are the same as in 1790, but the ranking has changed radically as the northern states have far outstripped the southern.  New York alone has added more than a half million in 20 years while Virginia and North Carolina together have added only a quarter of a million. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York will grow even faster.  

The North-South difference were not apparent to all since Kentucky and Tennessee, with less opposition from the British and Native Americans, initially grew faster than the Midwestern states.  This was to change: by 1840 Ohio was the third largest state.  The negative impact of slavery on free population growth had been observed by Benjamin Franklin more than fifty years earlier.  One of the six things that "must diminish a nation" was the introduction of slavery:

"The Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100." (In Jorgenson, page 219-220)

Urbanization and Industrialization

The north is urbanizing faster, also, and showing early signs of industrializing.  The largest city is New York with a population of 120 thousand.  The largest border city, Baltimore, is less than half that size, and the largest Southern city is New Orleans, with a population of only seventeen thousand.  Multi-cultural New Orleans, with a large free African-American population, is atypical, however.  The largest of the more typical southern cities is Richmond with less than 10 thousand persons (Bogue, Table 3-13, pages 120-123.  Bogue uses the modern boundaries of the cities, so these numbers can be higher than those reported elsewhere).

Eli Whitney received another contract for the manufacture of arms for the War of 1812. His techniques of mass production were adopted by the federal government and used in its armories. In 1810- 1811, Thomas Cabot Lowell travelled to England to study the power looms used in the textile industry. Committing what he saw to memory he returned to Boston in 1812, and with the help of Paul Moody reinvented the power loom. Lowell and his brother-in-law, the wealthy Patrick Tracy Jackson, purchased a water power site on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. Manufacturing could now attract capital: the brothers-in-law raised $300,000 and in 1815 opened a factory in Waltham, Massachusetts:

Each stage of production from raw cotton to finished cloth was under one roof, and each stage was mechanized to keep pace with the next…Here was the realization of mass production." (Cochran, page 123.)

Lowell had seen the conditions of the workers in England and wanted something better.  He recruited hard-working virtuous young women from the farms and provided a supervised, wholesome, and educational environment.  Lowell died young, but his formula was applied in the new and namesake town of Lowell, Massachusetts, which drew its water power from the Merrimac River.  By 1831, 2,500 young women worked in the mills of Lowell, the textile center of the U.S.

Most important, the example of capital and innovation working together for mutual profit was contagious.  When the immigrant influx begins in the 1830s, the North will be the land of opportunity which attracts them, their talents and their energy; the South will not.  The South's problem is that a fully settled state organized around slavery and agriculture offers little opportunity for the young, gifted and ambitious whether immigrant or native born.  Virginia has provided the leadership for the new nation, but now the best of Virginia's youth will move west.