chigan, and later into northern
central Wisconsin, following the belt of the hardwood forests. So
considerable were their numbers that such an economist as Roscher wrote
of the feasibility of making Wisconsin a German State. "They can plant
the vine on the hills," cried Franz Loeher in 1847, "and drink with happy
song and dance; they can have German schools and universities, German
literature and art, German science and philosophy, German courts and
assemblies; in short, they can form a German State, in which the German
language shall be as much the popular and official language as the
English is now, and in which the German spirit shall rule." By 1860 the
German-born were sixteen per cent of the population of the State. But
the New York and New England stream proved even more broad and steady in
its flow in these years before the war. Wisconsin's population rose from
30,000 in 1840 to 300,000 in 1850.

The New England element that entered this State is probably typical of
the same element in Wisconsin's neighboring States, and demands notice.
It came for the most part, not from the seaboard of Massachusetts, which
has so frequently represented New England to the popular apprehension. A
large element in this stock was the product of the migration that
ascended the valleys of Connecticut and central Massachusetts through
the hills into Vermont and New York,--a pioneer folk almost from the
time of their origin. The Vermont colonists decidedly outnumbered those
of Massachusetts in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and were far more
numerous in other Northwestern States than the population of Vermont
warranted. Together with this current came the settlers from western New
York. These were generally descendants of this same pioneer New England
stock, continuing into a remoter West the movement that had brought
their parents to New York. The combined current from New England and New
York thus constituted a distinctly modified New England stock, and was
clearly the dominant native element in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The decade of the forties was also the period of Iowa's rapid increase.
Although not politically a part of the Old Northwest, in history she is
closely related to that region. Her growth was by no means so rapid as
was Wisconsin's, for the proportion of foreign immigration was less.
Whereas in 1850 more than one-third of Wisconsin's population was
foreign-born, the proportion for Iowa was not much over one-tenth. The
m