rhood of Jefferson City the slaves numbered more than a
fourth of the population.

Into this stream of migration from the planting South flowed another
current of land-tilling farmers; some from Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Mississippi, driven out by the onrush of the planters buying and
consolidating small farms into vast estates; and still more from the
East and the Old World. To the northwest over against Iowa and to the
southwest against Arkansas, these yeomen laid out farms to be tilled by
their own labor. In those regions the number of slaves seldom rose above
five or six per cent of the population. The old French post, St. Louis,
enriched by the fur trade of the Far West and the steamboat traffic of
the river, grew into a thriving commercial city, including among its
seventy-five thousand inhabitants in 1850 nearly forty thousand
foreigners, German immigrants from Pennsylvania and Europe being the
largest single element.

=Arkansas.=--Below Missouri lay the territory of Arkansas, which had
long been the paradise of the swarthy hunter and the restless
frontiersman fleeing from the advancing borders of farm and town. In
search of the life, wild and free, where the rifle supplied the game and
a few acres of ground the corn and potatoes, they had filtered into the
territory in an unending drift, "squatting" on the land. Without so much
as asking the leave of any government, territorial or national, they
claimed as their own the soil on which they first planted their feet.
Like the Cherokee Indians, whom they had as neighbors, whose very
customs and dress they sometimes adopted, the squatters spent their days
in the midst of rough plenty, beset by chills, fevers, and the ills of
the flesh, but for many years unvexed by political troubles or the
restrictions of civilized life.

Unfortunately for them, however, the fertile valleys of the Mississippi
and Arkansas were well adapted to the cultivation of cotton and tobacco
and their sylvan peace was soon broken by an invasion of planters. The
newcomers, with their servile workers, spread upward in the valley
toward Missouri and along the southern border westward to the Red River.
In time the slaves in the tier of counties against Louisiana ranged from
thirty to seventy per cent of the population. This marked the doom of
the small farmer, swept Arkansas into the main current of planting
politics, and led to a powerful lobby at Washington in favor of
admission to the union, a