sposed to restrict jealously, President
Jefferson bought from Napoleon I. the great expanse of country west of
the Mississippi called Louisiana. This region in the extreme south was
no wider than the present State of Louisiana, but further north it
widened out so as to take in the whole watershed of the Missouri and its
tributaries, including in the extreme north nearly all the present State
of Montana. In 1819 Florida was purchased from Spain, and that country
at the same time abandoned its claims to a strip of coastland which now
forms the sea-board of Alabama and Mississippi.

Such was the extent of the United States when Lincoln began his political
life. In the movement of population by which this domain was being
settled up, different streams may be roughly distinguished. First, there
was from 1780 onwards a constant movement of the poorer class and of
younger sons of rich men from the great State of Virginia and to some
extent from the Carolinas into Kentucky and Tennessee, whence they often
shifted further north into Indiana and Illinois, or sometimes further
west into Missouri. It was mainly a movement of single families or
groups of families of adventurous pioneers, very sturdy, and very
turbulent. Then there came the expansion of the great plantation
interest in the further South, carrying with it as it spread, not
occasional slaves as in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the whole plantation
system. This movement went not only directly westward, but still more by
the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, into the State of Louisiana,
where a considerable French population had settled, the State of
Mississippi, and later into Missouri. Later still came the westward
movement from the Northern States. The energies of the people in these
States had at first been to great extent absorbed by sea-going pursuits
and the subjugation of their own rugged soil, so that they reached
western regions like Illinois rather later than did the settlers from
States further south. Ultimately, as their manufactures grew,
immigration from Europe began its steady flow to these States, and the
great westward stream, which continuing in our days has filled up the
rich lands of the far North-West, grew in volume. But want of natural
timber and other causes hindered the development of the fertile prairie
soil in the regions beyond the upper Mississippi, till the period of
railway development, which began about 1840, was far advanced