interest in the further South, carrying with it as it spread, not
occasional slaves as in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the whole plantation
system. This movement went not only directly westward, but still more by
the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, into the State of Louisiana,
where a considerable French population had settled, the State of
Mississippi, and later into Missouri. Later still came the westward
movement from the Northern States. The energies of the people in these
States had at first been to great extent absorbed by sea-going pursuits
and the subjugation of their own rugged soil, so that they reached
western regions like Illinois rather later than did the settlers from
States further south. Ultimately, as their manufactures grew,
immigration from Europe began its steady flow to these States, and the
great westward stream, which continuing in our days has filled up the
rich lands of the far North-West, grew in volume. But want of natural
timber and other causes hindered the development of the fertile prairie
soil in the regions beyond the upper Mississippi, till the period of
railway development, which began about 1840, was far advanced. Illinois
was Far West in 1830, Iowa and Minnesota continued to be so in 1860. The
Northerners, when they began to move westward, came in comparatively
large numbers, bringing comparatively ordered habits and the full
machinery of outward civilisation with them. Thus a great social change
followed upon their arrival in the regions to which only scattered
pioneers such as the Lincolns had previously penetrated. In Illinois,
with which so much of our story is bound up, the rapidity of that change
may be estimated from the fact that the population of that State
multiplied sevenfold between the time when Lincoln settled there and the
day when he left it as President.

The concluding stages by which the dominions of the United States came to
be as we know them were: the annexation by agreement in 1846 of the