For nearly half a century the American stock remained almost entirely free from foreign admixture.  It is estimated that between 1790 and 1820 only 250,000 immigrants came to America, and of these the great majority came after the War of 1812.  The white population of the United States in 1820 was 7,862,166.  Ten years later it had risen to 10,537,378.  This astounding increase was almost wholly due to the fecundity of the native stock.  The equitable balance between the sexes, the ease of acquiring a home, the vigorous pioneer environment, and the informal frontier social conditions all encouraged large families.  Early marriages were encouraged.  Bachelors and unmarried women were rare.  Girls were matrons at twenty-five and grand-mothers at forty.  Three generations frequently dwelt in one homestead.  Families of five persons were the rule; families of eight or ten were common, while families of fourteen or fifteen did not elicit surprise.  It was the father’s ambition to leave a farm to every son and, if the neighborhood was too densely settled easily to permit this, there was the West—­always the West.

This was a race of nation builders.  No sooner had he made the Declaration of Independence a reality than the eager pathfinder turned his face towards the setting sun and, prompted by the instincts of conquest, he plunged into the wilderness.  Within a few years western New York and Pennsylvania were settled; Kentucky achieved statehood in 1792 and Tennessee four years later, soon to be followed by Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819.  The great Northwest Territory yielded Ohio in 1802, Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, and Michigan in 1837.  Beyond the Mississippi the empire of Louisiana doubled the original area of the Republic; Louisiana came into statehood in 1812 and Missouri in 1821.  Texas, Oregon, and the fruits of the Mexican War extended its confines to the Western Sea.  Incredibly swift as was this march of the Stars, the American pioneer was always in advance.

The pathfinders were virtually all of American stock.  The States admitted to the Union prior to 1840 were not only founded by them; they were almost wholly settled by them.  When the influx of foreigners began in the thirties, they found all the trails already blazed, the trading posts established, and the first terrors of the wilderness dispelled.  They found territories already metamorphosed into States, counties organized, cities established.  Schools, churches, and colleges preceded the immigrants who were settlers and not strictly pioneers.  The entire territory ceded by the Treaty of 1783 was appropriated in large measure by the American before the advent of the European immigrant.

Washington, with a ring of pride, said in 1796 that the native population of America was “filling the western part of the State of New York and the country on the Ohio with their own surplusage.”  And James Madison in 1821 wrote that New England, “which has sent out such a continued swarm to other parts of the Union for a number of years, has continued at the same time, as the census shows, to increase in population although it is well known that it has received but comparatively few emigrants from any quarter.”  Beyond the Mississippi, Louisiana, with its Creole population, was feeling the effect of American migration.