the Mississippi River. Virginia had in the meantime effectively
colonised Kentucky to the west of her, and for a time this was treated as
within her borders. In a similar way Tennessee had been settled from
North and South Carolina and was treated as part of the former. Virginia
had also established claims by conquest north of the Ohio River in what
was called the North-West Territory, but these claims and all similar
claims of particular States in unsettled or half-settled territory were
shortly before or shortly after the adoption of the Constitution ceded to
the Union Government. But the dominions of that Government soon received
a vast accession. In 1803, by a brave exercise of the Constitutional
powers which he was otherwise disposed 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