A Restless People. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of America in 1803, but as late as 1812 only one out of fourteen Americans lived west of the Appalachians, and two-thirds of the population still lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic. That changed dramatically after victory in the War of 1812 removed the British and their native allies as barriers to white settlement of the West. Between 1810 and 1820 the population west of the Alleghenies doubled, and by 1840 one-third of Americans lived beyond the mountains, ten times the number of people only three decades before. By 1850 almost half of the American population lived outside their state of birth. The federal government encouraged this overland migration, first by selling public land with liberal liberal credit terms, then by reducing the required minimum acreage purchase, not to mention the six million acres worth of Western land bounties handed...