Promised Land. When Indiana farmer Jacob Sickler wrote to his brother back home in New Jersey in 1846, he summed up the attitude of many Northern farmers: "I often think of you when I come in at night and place a candle on the stand and take the rocking chair and newspaper and compare our two situations[.] you have been all day . . . spending your strength and time striving to get some thing to stimilate the old sand to raise a potato whilst I have been to Lafayette with a load of grain and think that a task[.] you had better just take a peep out here some of these days and see the differents. I can truly say I have got right down lazy this winter never felt so independent as regards a liveing in all my life [al]most to lazy to...